ALSO BY OLIVER BURKEMAN

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who

Can’t Stand Positive Thinking

Help! How to Become Slightly Happier and

Get a Bit More Done

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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Title: Four thousand weeks : time management for mortals / Oliver Burkeman. Names: Burkeman,

Oliver, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200318063 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200318152 | ISBN

9780735232464 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735232471 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: Time management.

Classification: LCC HD69.T54 B87 2021 | DDC 640/.43—dc23

Ebook ISBN 9780735232464

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To Heather and Rowan

It’s the very last thing, isn’t it, we feel

grateful for: having happened. You know,

you needn’t have happened. You needn’t

have happened. But you did happen.

—DOUGLAS HARDING

What makes it unbearable is your mistaken

belief that it can be cured.

—CHARLOTTE JOKO BECK

Contents
Cover
Also by Oliver Burkeman
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: In the Long Run, We’re All Dead
Part I: Choosing to Choose
1. The Limit-Embracing Life
2. The Efficiency Trap
3. Facing Finitude
4. Becoming a Better Procrastinator
5. The Watermelon Problem
6. The Intimate Interrupter
Part II: Beyond Control
7. We Never Really Have Time
8. You Are Here
9. Rediscovering Rest
10. The Impatience Spiral
11. Staying on the Bus
12. The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad

13. Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

14. The Human Disease

Afterword: Beyond Hope

Appendix: Ten Tools for Embracing Your Finitude

Notes

Acknowledgments

A Note About the Author

Introduction: In the Long Run, We’re

All Dead

he average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly

short. Here’s one way of putting things in perspective: the first

modern humans appeared on the plains of Africa at least 200,000

years ago, and scientists estimate that life, in some form, will persist for

another 1.5 billion years or more, until the intensifying heat of the sun

condemns the last organism to death. But you? Assuming you live to be

eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.

Certainly, you might get lucky: make it to ninety, and you’ll have had

almost 4,700 weeks. You might get really lucky, like Jeanne Calment, the

Frenchwoman who was thought to be 122 when she died in 1997, making

her the oldest person on record. Calment claimed she could recall meeting

Vincent van Gogh—she mainly remembered his reeking of alcohol—and

she was still around for the birth of the first successfully cloned mammal,

Dolly the sheep, in 1996. Biologists predict that lifespans within striking

distance of Calment’s could soon become commonplace. Yet even she got

only about 6,400 weeks.

Expressing the matter in such startling terms makes it easy to see why

philosophers from ancient Greece to the present day have taken the brevity

of life to be the defining problem of human existence: we’ve been granted

the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet

practically no time at all to put them into action. “This space that has been

granted to us rushes by so speedily and so swiftly that all save a very few

find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live,” lamented

Seneca, the Roman philosopher, in a letter known today under the title On

the Shortness of Life. When I first made the four-thousand-weeks

calculation, I felt queasy; but once I’d recovered, I started pestering my

friends, asking them to guess—off the top of their heads, without doing any

mental arithmetic—how many weeks they thought the average person could

expect to live. One named a number in the six figures. Yet, as I felt obliged

to inform her, a fairly modest six-figure number of weeks—310,000—is the

approximate duration of all human civilization since the ancient Sumerians

of Mesopotamia. On almost any meaningful timescale, as the contemporary

philosopher Thomas Nagel has written, “we will all be dead any minute.”

It follows from this that time management, broadly defined, should be

everyone’s chief concern. Arguably, time management is all life is. Yet the

modern discipline known as time management—like its hipper cousin,

productivity—is a depressingly narrow-minded affair, focused on how to

crank through as many work tasks as possible, or on devising the perfect

morning routine, or on cooking all your dinners for the week in one big

batch on Sundays. These things matter to some extent, no doubt. But

they’re hardly all that matters. The world is bursting with wonder, and yet

it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility

that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more

of that wonder. The world also seems to be heading to hell in a handcart—

our civic life has gone insane, a pandemic has paralyzed society, and the

planet is getting hotter and hotter—but good luck finding a time

management system that makes any room for engaging productively with

your fellow citizens, with current events, or with the fate of the

environment. At the very least, you might have assumed there’d be a

handful of productivity books that take seriously the stark facts about the

shortness of life, instead of pretending that we can just ignore the subject.

But you’d be wrong.

So this book is an attempt to help redress the balance—to see if we can’t

discover, or recover, some ways of thinking about time that do justice to our

real situation: to the outrageous brevity and shimmering possibilities of our

four thousand weeks.

Life on the Conveyor Belt

In one sense, of course, nobody these days needs telling that there isn’t

enough time. We’re obsessed with our overfilled inboxes and lengthening

to-do lists, haunted by the guilty feeling that we ought to be getting more

done, or different things done, or both. (How can you be sure that people

feel so busy? It’s like the line about how to know whether someone’s a

vegan: don’t worry, they’ll tell you.) Surveys reliably show that we feel

more pressed for time than ever before; yet in 2013, research by a team of

Dutch academics raised the amusing possibility that such surveys may

understate the scale of the busyness epidemic—because many people feel

too busy to participate in surveys. Recently, as the gig economy has grown,

busyness has been rebranded as “hustle”—relentless work not as a burden

to be endured but as an exhilarating lifestyle choice, worth boasting about

on social media. In reality, though, it’s the same old problem, pushed to an

extreme: the pressure to fit ever-increasing quantities of activity into a

stubbornly nonincreasing quantity of daily time.

And yet busyness is really only the beginning. Many other complaints,

when you stop to think about them, are essentially complaints about our

limited time. Take the daily battle against online distraction, and the

alarming sense that our attention spans have shriveled to such a degree that

even those of us who were bookworms as children now struggle to make it

through a paragraph without experiencing the urge to reach for our phones.

What makes this so troubling, in the end, is that it represents a failure to

make the best use of a small supply of time. (You’d feel less self-loathing

about wasting a morning on Facebook if the supply of mornings were

inexhaustible.) Or perhaps your problem isn’t being too busy but

insufficiently busy, languishing in a dull job, or not employed at all. That’s

still a situation made far more distressing by the shortness of life, because

you’re using up your limited time in a way you’d rather not. Even some of

the very worst aspects of our era—like our viciously hyperpartisan politics

and terrorists radicalized via YouTube videos—can be explained, in a

roundabout way, by the same underlying facts concerning life’s brevity. It’s

because our time and attention are so limited, and therefore valuable, that

social media companies are incentivized to grab as much of them as they

can, by any means necessary—which is why they show users material

guaranteed to drive them into a rage, instead of the more boring and

accurate stuff.

Then there are all those timeless human dilemmas like whom to marry,

whether to have children, and what kind of work to pursue. If we had

thousands of years in which to live, all those would be far less agonizing,

too, since there’d be sufficient time to spend decades trying out each kind of

possible existence. Meanwhile, no catalog of our time-related troubles

would be complete without mentioning that alarming phenomenon, familiar

to anyone older than about thirty, whereby time seems to speed up as you

age—steadily accelerating until, to judge from the reports of people in their

seventies and eighties, months begin to flash by in what feels like minutes.

It’s hard to imagine a crueler arrangement: not only are our four thousand

weeks constantly running out, but the fewer of them we have left, the faster

we seem to lose them.

And if our relationship to our limited time has always been a difficult

one, recent events have brought matters to a head. In 2020, in lockdown

during the coronavirus pandemic, with our normal routines suspended,

many people reported feeling that time was disintegrating completely,

giving rise to the disorienting impression that their days were somehow

simultaneously racing by and dragging on interminably. Time divided us,

even more than it had before: for those with jobs and small children at

home, there wasn’t enough of it; for those furloughed or unemployed, there

was too much. People found themselves working at strange hours, detached

from the cycles of daytime and darkness, hunched over glowing laptops at

home, or risking their lives in hospitals and mail-order warehouses. And it

felt as though the future had been put on hold, leaving many of us stuck, in

the words of one psychiatrist, “in a new kind of everlasting present”—an

anxious limbo of social media scrolling and desultory Zoom calls and

insomnia, in which it felt impossible to make meaningful plans, or even to

clearly picture life beyond the end of next week.

All of which makes it especially frustrating that so many of us are so

bad at managing our limited time—that our efforts to make the most of it

don’t simply fail but regularly seem to make things worse. For years now,

we’ve been deluged with advice on living the fully optimized life, in books

with titles such as Extreme Productivity and The 4-Hour Workweek and

Smarter Faster Better, plus websites full of “life hacks” for whittling

seconds off everyday chores. (Note the curious suggestion, in the term “life

hack,” that your life is best thought of as some kind of faulty contraption, in

need of modification so as to stop it from performing suboptimally.) There

are numerous apps and wearable devices for maximizing the payoffs from

your workday, your workouts, and even your sleep, plus meal replacement

drinks like Soylent to eliminate time wasted eating dinner. And the chief

selling point of a thousand other products and services, from kitchen

appliances to online banking, is that they’ll help you achieve the widely

championed goal of squeezing the most from your time.

The problem isn’t exactly that these techniques and products don’t

work. It’s that they do work—in the sense that you’ll get more done, race to

more meetings, ferry your kids to more after-school activities, generate

more profit for your employer—and yet, paradoxically, you only feel busier,

more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result. In the modern world, the

American anthropologist Edward T. Hall once pointed out, time feels like

an unstoppable conveyor belt, bringing us new tasks as fast as we can

dispatch the old ones; and becoming “more productive” just seems to cause

the belt to speed up. Or else, eventually, to break down: it’s now common to

encounter reports, especially from younger adults, of an all-encompassing,

bone-deep burnout, characterized by an inability to complete basic daily

chores—the paralyzing exhaustion of “a generation of finely honed tools,

crafted from embryos to be lean, mean production machines,” in the words

of the millennial social critic Malcolm Harris.

This is the maddening truth about time, which most advice on managing

it seems to miss. It’s like an obstreperous toddler: the more you struggle to

control it, to make it conform to your agenda, the further it slips from your

control. Consider all the technology intended to help us gain the upper hand

over time: by any sane logic, in a world with dishwashers, microwaves, and

jet engines, time ought to feel more expansive and abundant, thanks to all

the hours freed up. But this is nobody’s actual experience. Instead, life

accelerates, and everyone grows more impatient. It’s somehow vastly more

aggravating to wait two minutes for the microwave than two hours for the

oven—or ten seconds for a slow-loading web page versus three days to

receive the same information by mail.

The same self-defeating pattern applies to many of our attempts to

become more productive at work. A few years ago, drowning in email, I

successfully implemented the system known as Inbox Zero, but I soon

discovered that when you get tremendously efficient at answering email, all

that happens is that you get much more email. Feeling busier—thanks to all

that email—I bought Getting Things Done, by the time management guru

David Allen, lured by his promise that it is “possible for a person to have an

overwhelming number of things to do and still function productively with a

clear head” and “what the martial artists call a ‘mind like water.’ ” But I

failed to appreciate Allen’s deeper implication—that there’ll always be too

much to do—and instead set about attempting to get an impossible amount

done. In fact, I did get better at racing through my to-do list, only to find

that greater volumes of work magically started to appear. (Actually, it’s not

magic; it’s simple psychology, plus capitalism. More on that later.)

None of this is how the future was supposed to feel. In 1930, in a speech

titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John

Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction: Within a century, thanks to the

growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to

work more than about fifteen hours a week. The challenge would be how to

fill all our newfound leisure time without going crazy. “For the first time

since his creation,” Keynes told his audience, “man will be faced with his

real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing

economic cares.” But Keynes was wrong. It turns out that when people

make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need

and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the

Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they

nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up. As a result,

they work harder and harder, and soon busyness becomes an emblem of

prestige. Which is clearly completely absurd: for almost the whole of

history, the entire point of being rich was not having to work so much.

Moreover, the busyness of the better-off is contagious, because one

extremely effective way to make more money, for those at the top of the

tree, is to cut costs and make efficiency improvements in their companies

and industries. That means greater insecurity for those lower down, who are

then obliged to work harder just to get by.

On Getting the Wrong Things Done

But now here we get to the heart of things, to a feeling that goes deeper, and

that’s harder to put into words: the sense that despite all this activity, even

the relatively privileged among us rarely get around to doing the right

things. We sense that there are important and fulfilling ways we could be

spending our time, even if we can’t say exactly what they are—yet we

systematically spend our days doing other things instead. This yearning for

more meaning can take many forms: It’s there, for instance, in the desire to

devote yourself to some larger cause, in the intuition that this particular

moment in history, with all its crises and suffering, might demand more

from you than the usual getting and spending. But it’s also there in the

feeling of frustration at having to work a day job in order to buy slivers of

time for the work you love, and in the simple longing to spend more of your

brief time on earth with your kids, in nature, or, at the very least, not

commuting. The environmentalist and spiritual writer Charles Eisenstein

recalls first sensing this basic “wrongness” in our use of time as a child,

growing up amid material comfort in 1970s America:

Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the

world was supposed to be more beautiful. We were not supposed to hate Mondays and live

for the weekends and holidays. We were not supposed to have to raise our hands to be

allowed to pee. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day.

And this feeling of wrongness is only exacerbated by our attempts to

become more productive, which seem to have the effect of pushing the

genuinely important stuff ever further over the horizon. Our days are spent

trying to “get through” tasks, in order to get them “out of the way,” with the

result that we live mentally in the future, waiting for when we’ll finally get

around to what really matters—and worrying, in the meantime, that we

don’t measure up, that we might lack the drive or stamina to keep pace with

the speed at which life now seems to move. “The spirit of the times is one

of joyless urgency,” writes the essayist Marilynne Robinson, who observes

that many of us spend our lives “preparing ourselves and our children to be

means to inscrutable ends that are utterly not our own.” Our struggle to stay

on top of everything may serve someone’s interests; working longer hours—

and using any extra income to buy more consumer goods—turns us into

better cogs in the economic machine. But it doesn’t result in peace of mind,

or lead us to spend more of our finite time on those people and things we

care most deeply about ourselves.

Four Thousand Weeks is yet another book about making the best use of

time. But it is written in the belief that time management as we know it has

failed miserably, and that we need to stop pretending otherwise. This

strange moment in history, when time feels so unmoored, might in fact

provide the ideal opportunity to reconsider our relationship with it. Older

thinkers have faced these challenges before us, and when their wisdom is

applied to the present day, certain truths grow more clearly apparent.

Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more

rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.

Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,”

whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the

“six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive

when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails

has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer;

when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life;

when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball;

and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last,

to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting

defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.

But you know what? That’s excellent news.

Part I

Choosing to Choose

The Limit-Embracing Life

he real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem—or so I

hope to convince you—is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel

pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use

our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things

worse. To see how we got here, and how to escape into a better relationship

with time, we need to rewind the clock—back to before there were clocks.

On balance, you should definitely be grateful you weren’t born a

peasant in early medieval England. For one thing, you’d have been much

less likely to make it to adulthood; but even if you had, the life that

stretched ahead of you would have been one defined by servitude. You’d

have spent your backbreaking days farming the land on which the local lord

permitted you to live, in exchange for giving him a crippling proportion of

what you produced or the income you could generate from it. The church

would have demanded regular contributions as well, and you’d have been

much too scared of eternal damnation to disobey. At night, you would have

retreated to your one-room hut, alongside not only the rest of your family

(who, like you, would rarely have bathed or brushed their teeth) but also

your pigs and chickens, which you brought indoors at night; bears and

wolves still roamed the forests and would help themselves to any animals

left outside after sunset. Disease would have been another constant

companion: familiar sicknesses ranged from measles and influenza to

bubonic plague and St. Anthony’s fire, a form of food poisoning caused by

moldy grain, which left the delirious sufferer feeling as though his skin

were burning or as if he were being bitten by unseen teeth.

Time Before Timetables

But there’s one set of problems you almost certainly wouldn’t have

experienced: problems of time. Even on your most exhausting days, it

probably wouldn’t have occurred to you that you had “too much to do,” that

you needed to hurry, or that life was moving too fast, let alone that you’d

gotten your work-life balance wrong. By the same token, on quieter days,

you would never have felt bored. And though death was a constant

presence, with lives cut short far more frequently than they are today, time

wouldn’t have felt in limited supply. You wouldn’t have felt any pressure to

find ways to “save” it. Nor would you have felt guilty for wasting it: if you

took an afternoon break from threshing grain to watch a cockfight on the

village green, it wouldn’t have felt like you were shirking during “work

time.” And none of this was simply because things moved more slowly

back then, or because medieval peasants were more relaxed or more

resigned to their fate. It was because, so far as we can tell, they generally

didn’t experience time as an abstract entity—as a thing—at all.

If that sounds confusing, it’s because our modern way of thinking about

time is so deeply entrenched that we forget it even is a way of thinking;

we’re like the proverbial fish who have no idea what water is, because it

surrounds them completely. Get a little mental distance on it, though, and

our perspective starts to look rather peculiar. We imagine time to be

something separate from us and from the world around us, “an independent

world of mathematically measurable sequences,” in the words of the

American cultural critic Lewis Mumford. To see what he means, consider

some time-related question—how you plan to spend tomorrow afternoon,

say, or what you’ve accomplished over the last year—and without being

fully conscious of it at first, you’ll probably find yourself visualizing a

calendar, a yardstick, a tape measure, the numbers on a clock face, or some

hazier kind of abstract timeline. You’ll then proceed to measure and judge

your real life against this imaginary gauge, lining up your activities against

the timeline in your head. Edward Hall was making the same point with his

image of time as a conveyor belt that’s constantly passing us by. Each hour

or week or year is like a container being carried on the belt, which we must

fill as it passes, if we’re to feel that we’re making good use of our time.

When there are too many activities to fit comfortably into the containers,

we feel unpleasantly busy; when there are too few, we feel bored. If we

keep pace with the passing containers, we congratulate ourselves for

“staying on top of things” and feel like we’re justifying our existence; if we

let too many pass by unfilled, we feel we’ve wasted them. If we use

containers labeled “work time” for the purposes of leisure, our employer

may grow irritated. (He paid for those containers; they belong to him!)

The medieval farmer simply had no reason to adopt such a bizarre idea

in the first place. Workers got up with the sun and slept at dusk, the lengths

of their days varying with the seasons. There was no need to think of time

as something abstract and separate from life: you milked the cows when

they needed milking and harvested the crops when it was harvesttime, and

anybody who tried to impose an external schedule on any of that—for

example, by doing a month’s milking in a single day to get it out of the way,

or by trying to make the harvest come sooner—would rightly have been

considered a lunatic. There was no anxious pressure to “get everything

done,” either, because a farmer’s work is infinite: there will always be

another milking and another harvest, forever, so there’s no sense in racing

toward some hypothetical moment of completion. Historians call this way

of living “task orientation,” because the rhythms of life emerge organically

from the tasks themselves, rather than from being lined up against an

abstract timeline, the approach that has become second nature for us today.

(It’s tempting to think of medieval life as moving slowly, but it’s more

accurate to say that the concept of life “moving slowly” would have struck

most people as meaningless. Slowly as compared with what?) In those days

before clocks, when you did need to explain how long something might

take, your only option was to compare it with some other concrete activity.

Medieval people might speak of a task lasting a “Miserere whyle”—the

approximate time it took to recite Psalm 50, known as the Miserere, from

the Bible—or alternatively a “pissing whyle,” which should require no

explanation.

Living this way, one can imagine that experience would have felt

expansive and fluid, suffused with something it might not be an

exaggeration to call a kind of magic. Notwithstanding the many real

privations of his existence, our peasant farmer might have sensed a

luminous, awe-inspiring dimension to the world around him. Untroubled by

any notion of time “ticking away,” he might have experienced a heightened

awareness of the vividness of things, the feeling of timelessness that

Richard Rohr, a contemporary Franciscan priest and author, calls “living in

deep time.” At dusk, the medieval country-dweller might have sensed

spirits whispering in the forest, along with the bears and wolves; plowing

the fields, he might have felt himself one tiny part of a vast sweep of

history, in which his distant ancestors were almost as alive to him as his

own children. We can assert all this with some confidence because we still

occasionally encounter islands of deep time today—in those moments

when, to quote the writer Gary Eberle, we slip “into a realm where there is

enough of everything, where we are not trying to fill a void in ourselves or

the world.” The boundary separating the self from the rest of reality grows

blurry, and time stands still. “The clock does not stop, of course,” Eberle

writes, “but we do not hear it ticking.”

This happens for some people in prayer, or in meditation, or in

magnificent landscapes; I’m pretty sure my toddler son spent the whole of

his infancy in such a state and is only now beginning to leave it. (Until we

get them onto schedules, babies are the ultimate “task-oriented” beings,

which, along with sleep deprivation, may explain the otherworldliness of

those first few months with a newborn: you’re dragged from clock time into

deep time, whether you like it or not.) The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung,

visiting Kenya in 1925, was setting out on a hike in the first glow of dawn

when he, too, was suddenly plunged into timelessness:

From a low hill in this broad savanna, a magnificent prospect opened out to us. To the very

brink of the horizon we saw gigantic herds of animals: gazelle, antelope, gnu, zebra, warthog,

and so on. Grazing heads nodding, the herds moved forward like slow rivers. There was

scarcely any sound save the melancholy cry of a bird of prey. This was the stillness of the

eternal beginning, the world as it had always been, in the state of non-being…I walked away

from my companions until I had put them out of sight, and savored the feeling of being

entirely alone.

The End of Eternity

There’s one huge drawback in giving so little thought to the abstract idea of

time, though, which is that it severely limits what you can accomplish. You

can be a small-scale farmer, relying on the seasons for your schedule, but

you can’t be much other than a small-scale farmer (or a baby). As soon as

you want to coordinate the actions of more than a handful of people, you

need a reliable, agreed-upon method of measuring time. This is widely held

to be how the first mechanical clocks came to be invented, by medieval

monks, who had to begin their morning prayers while it was still dark, and

needed some way of ensuring that the whole monastery woke up at the

required point. (Their earlier strategies included deputizing one monk to

stay awake all night, watching the movements of the stars—a system that

worked only when it wasn’t cloudy, and the night-shift monk didn’t fall

asleep.) Making time standardized and visible in this fashion inevitably

encourages people to think of it as an abstract thing with an independent

existence, distinct from the specific activities on which one might spend it;

“time” is what ticks away as the hands move around the clockface. The

Industrial Revolution is usually attributed to the invention of the steam

engine; but as Mumford shows in his 1934 magnum opus, Technics and

Civilization, it also probably couldn’t have happened without the clock. By

the late 1700s, rural peasants were streaming into English cities, taking jobs

in mills and factories, each of which required the coordination of hundreds

of people, working fixed hours, often six days a week, to keep the machines

running.

From thinking about time in the abstract, it’s natural to start treating it

as a resource, something to be bought and sold and used as efficiently as

possible, like coal or iron or any other raw material. Previously, laborers

had been paid for a vaguely defined “day’s work,” or on a piecework basis,

receiving a given sum per bale of hay or per slaughtered pig. But gradually

it became more common to be paid by the hour—and the factory owner

who used his workers’ hours efficiently, squeezing as much labor as

possible from each employee, stood to make a bigger profit than one who

didn’t. Indeed, some cantankerous industrialists came to feel that workers

who didn’t drive themselves hard enough were literally guilty of stealing

something. “I have by sundry people [been] horribly cheated,” fumed the

iron magnate Ambrose Crowley, from County Durham in England, in a

memo from the 1790s, announcing his new policy of deducting pay for time

spent “smoking, singing, reading of news history, contention, disputes,

anything foreign to my business [or] in any way loitering.” The way

Crowley saw it, his lackadaisical employees were thieves, illegitimately

helping themselves to containers from the conveyor belt of time.

You don’t need to believe, as Mumford sometimes seems to imply, that

the invention of the clock is solely to blame for all our time-related troubles

today. (And I certainly won’t be arguing for a return to the lifestyle of

medieval peasants.) But a threshold had been crossed. Before, time was just

the medium in which life unfolded, the stuff that life was made of.

Afterward, once “time” and “life” had been separated in most people’s

minds, time became a thing that you used—and it’s this shift that serves as

the precondition for all the uniquely modern ways in which we struggle

with time today. Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel

pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and

to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it. When you’re faced with

too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to

make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself

harder, or working for longer—as if you were a machine in the Industrial

Revolution—instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be

unreasonable. It grows alluring to try to multitask—that is, to use the same

portion of time for two things at once, as the German philosopher Friedrich

Nietzsche was one of the first to notice: “One thinks with a watch in one’s

hand,” he complained in an 1887 essay, “even as one eats one’s midday

meal while reading the latest news of the stock market.” And it becomes a

lot more intuitive to project your thoughts about your life into an imagined

future, leaving you anxiously wondering if things will unfold as you want

them to. Soon, your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how

you’re using time: it stops being merely the water in which you swim and

turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control, if you’re to

avoid feeling guilty, panicked, or overwhelmed. The title of a book that

arrived on my desk the other day sums things up nicely: Master Your Time,

Master Your Life.

The fundamental problem is that this attitude toward time sets up a

rigged game in which it’s impossible ever to feel as though you’re doing

well enough. Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time—

instead of just being time, you might say—it becomes difficult not to value

each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or

for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are

finally “out of the way.” Superficially, this seems like a sensible way to live,

especially in a hypercompetitive economic climate, in which it feels as

though you must constantly make the most judicious use of your time if you

want to stay afloat. (It also reflects the manner in which most of us were

raised: to prioritize future benefits over current enjoyments.) But ultimately

it backfires. It wrenches us out of the present, leading to a life spent leaning

into the future, worrying about whether things will work out, experiencing

everything in terms of some later, hoped-for benefit, so that peace of mind

never quite arrives. And it makes it all but impossible to experience “deep

time,” that sense of timeless time which depends on forgetting the abstract

yardstick and plunging back into the vividness of reality instead.

As this modern mindset came to dominate, wrote Mumford, “Eternity

ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions.” In its

place came the dictatorship of the clock, the schedule, and the Google

Calendar alert; Marilynne Robinson’s “joyless urgency” and the constant

feeling that you ought to be getting more done. The trouble with attempting

to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you.

Confessions of a Productivity Geek

The rest of this book is an exploration of a saner way of relating to time and

a toolbox of practical ideas for doing so, drawn from the work of

philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers who all rejected the

struggle to dominate or master it. I believe it sketches a kind of life that’s

vastly more peaceful and meaningful—while also, it turns out, being better

for sustained productivity over the long haul. But don’t get me wrong: I

spent years trying, and failing, to achieve mastery over my time. In fact, the

symptoms were especially glaring in the subspecies to which I belonged. I

was a “productivity geek.” You know how some people are passionate

about bodybuilding, or fashion, or rock climbing, or poetry? Productivity

geeks are passionate about crossing items off their to-do lists. So it’s sort of

the same, except infinitely sadder.

My adventures with Inbox Zero were only the tip of the iceberg. I’ve

squandered countless hours—and a fair amount of money, spent mainly on

fancy notebooks and felt-tip pens—in service to the belief that if I could

only find the right time management system, build the right habits, and

apply sufficient self-discipline, I might actually be able to win the struggle

with time, once and for all. (I was enabled in this delusion by writing a

weekly newspaper column on productivity, which gave me an excuse to

experiment with new techniques on the grounds that I was doing so for

work purposes; I was like an alcoholic conveniently employed as a wine

expert.) On one occasion, I tried scheduling the whole of every day in

fifteen-minute blocks; on another, I used a kitchen timer to work

exclusively in periods of twenty-five minutes, interspersed with five-minute

breaks. (This approach has an official name, the Pomodoro Technique, and

a cult following online.) I divided my lists into A, B, and C priorities.

(Guess how many B- and C-priority tasks I ever got around to completing?)

I tried to align my daily actions with my goals, and my goals with my core

values. Using these techniques often made me feel as if I were on the verge

of ushering in a golden era of calm, undistracted productivity and

meaningful activity. But it never arrived. Instead, I just got more stressed

and unhappy.

I remember sitting on a park bench near my home in Brooklyn one

winter morning in 2014, feeling even more anxious than usual about the

volume of undone tasks, and suddenly realizing that none of this was ever

going to work. I would never succeed in marshaling enough efficiency, self-

discipline, and effort to force my way through to the feeling that I was on

top of everything, that I was fulfilling all my obligations and had no need to

worry about the future. Ironically, the realization that this had been a useless

strategy for attaining peace of mind brought me some immediate peace of

mind. (After all, once you become convinced that something you’ve been

attempting is impossible, it’s a lot harder to keep on berating yourself for

failing.) What I had yet to understand, at that point, was why all these

methods were doomed to fail, which was that I was using them to try to

obtain a feeling of control over my life that would always remain out of

reach.

Though I’d been largely unaware of it, my productivity obsession had

been serving a hidden emotional agenda. For one thing, it helped me

combat the sense of precariousness inherent to the modern world of work: if

I could meet every editor’s every demand, while launching various side

projects of my own, maybe one day I’d finally feel secure in my career and

my finances. But it also held at bay certain scary questions about what I was

doing with my life, and whether major changes might not be needed. If I

could get enough work done, my subconscious had apparently concluded, I

wouldn’t need to ask if it was all that healthy to be deriving so much of my

sense of self-worth from work in the first place. And as long as I was

always just on the cusp of mastering my time, I could avoid the thought that

what life was really demanding from me might involve surrendering the

craving for mastery and diving into the unknown instead. In my case, that

turned out to mean committing to a long-term relationship and, later,

making the decision with my wife to try to start a family—two things I’d

notably failed to get done with any number of systems for getting things

done. It had been more comforting to imagine that I might eventually

“optimize” myself into the kind of person who could confront such

decisions without fear, feeling totally in charge of the process. I didn’t want

to accept that this was never going to happen—that fear was part of the

deal, and that experiencing it wouldn’t destroy me.

But (don’t worry!) we won’t be dwelling here on my personal hang-ups.

The universal truth behind my specific issues is that most of us invest a lot

of energy, one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the

reality in which we find ourselves. We don’t want to feel the anxiety that

might arise if we were to ask ourselves whether we’re on the right path, or

what ideas about ourselves it could be time to give up. We don’t want to

risk getting hurt in relationships or failing professionally; we don’t want to

accept that we might never succeed in pleasing our parents or in changing

certain things we don’t like about ourselves—and we certainly don’t want

to get sick and die. The details differ from person to person, but the kernel

is the same. We recoil from the notion that this is it—that this life, with all

its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited

influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at. Instead,

we mentally fight against the way things are—so that, in the words of the

psychotherapist Bruce Tift, “we don’t have to consciously participate in

what it’s like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained

by reality.” This struggle against the distressing constraints of reality is

what some old-school psychoanalysts call “neurosis,” and it takes countless

forms, from workaholism and commitment-phobia to codependency and

chronic shyness.

Our troubled relationship with time arises largely from this same effort

to avoid the painful constraints of reality. And most of our strategies for

becoming more productive make things worse, because they’re really just

ways of furthering the avoidance. After all, it’s painful to confront how

limited your time is, because it means that tough choices are inevitable and

that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do. It’s also

painful to accept your limited control over the time you do get: maybe you

simply lack the stamina or talent or other resources to perform well in all

the roles you feel you should. And so, rather than face our limitations, we

engage in avoidance strategies, in an effort to carry on feeling limitless. We

push ourselves harder, chasing fantasies of the perfect work-life balance; or

we implement time management systems that promise to make time for

everything, so that tough choices won’t be required. Or we procrastinate,

which is another means of maintaining the feeling of omnipotent control

over life—because you needn’t risk the upsetting experience of failing at an

intimidating project, obviously, if you never even start it. We fill our minds

with busyness and distraction to numb ourselves emotionally. (“We labour

at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to

sustain our life,” wrote Nietzsche, “because to us it is even more necessary

not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is

in flight from himself.”) Or we plan compulsively, because the alternative is

to confront how little control over the future we really have. Moreover,

most of us seek a specifically individualistic kind of mastery over time—

our culture’s ideal is that you alone should control your schedule, doing

whatever you prefer, whenever you want—because it’s scary to confront the

truth that almost everything worth doing, from marriage and parenting to

business or politics, depends on cooperating with others, and therefore on

exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships.

Denying reality never works, though. It may provide some immediate

relief, because it allows you to go on thinking that at some point in the

future you might, at last, feel totally in control. But it can’t ever bring the

sense that you’re doing enough—that you are enough—because it defines

“enough” as a kind of limitless control that no human can attain. Instead,

the endless struggle leads to more anxiety and a less fulfilling life. For

example, the more you believe you might succeed in “fitting everything in,”

the more commitments you naturally take on, and the less you feel the need

to ask whether each new commitment is truly worth a portion of your time

—and so your days inevitably fill with more activities you don’t especially

value. The more you hurry, the more frustrating it is to encounter tasks (or

toddlers) that won’t be hurried; the more compulsively you plan for the

future, the more anxious you feel about any remaining uncertainties, of

which there will always be plenty. And the more individual sovereignty you

achieve over your time, the lonelier you get. All of this illustrates what

might be termed the paradox of limitation, which runs through everything

that follows: the more you try to manage your time with the goal of

achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable

constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life

gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead—and work

with them, rather than against them—the more productive, meaningful, and

joyful life becomes. I don’t think the feeling of anxiety ever completely

goes away; we’re even limited, apparently, in our capacity to embrace our

limitations. But I’m aware of no other time management technique that’s

half as effective as just facing the way things truly are.

An Icy Blast of Reality

In practical terms, a limit-embracing attitude to time means organizing your

days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for

everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do—and so, at

the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing. Since hard

choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them

consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than

letting them get made by default—or deceiving yourself that, with enough

hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to

make them at all. It also means resisting the seductive temptation to “keep

your options open”—which is really just another way of trying to feel in

control—in favor of deliberately making big, daunting, irreversible

commitments, which you can’t know in advance will turn out for the best,

but which reliably prove more fulfilling in the end. And it means standing

firm in the face of FOMO, the “fear of missing out,” because you come to

realize that missing out on something—indeed, on almost everything—is

basically guaranteed. Which isn’t actually a problem anyway, it turns out,

because “missing out” is what makes our choices meaningful in the first

place. Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the

sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time, but

didn’t—and to willingly make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without

reservation, on what matters most to you. I should probably clarify that I

have yet to attain perfection in any of these attitudes; I wrote this book for

myself, as much as for anyone else, putting my faith in the words of the

author Richard Bach: “You teach best what you most need to learn.”

This confrontation with limitation also reveals the truth that freedom,

sometimes, is to be found not in achieving greater sovereignty over your

own schedule but in allowing yourself to be constrained by the rhythms of

community—participating in forms of social life where you don’t get to

decide exactly what you do or when you do it. And it leads to the insight

that meaningful productivity often comes not from hurrying things up but

from letting them take the time they take, surrendering to what in German

has been called Eigenzeit, or the time inherent to a process itself. Perhaps

most radically of all, seeing and accepting our limited powers over our time

can prompt us to question the very idea that time is something you use in

the first place. There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful

notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to

implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of

responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.

I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting our troubles with time are

somehow all in the mind, or that a simple change of outlook will cause

them all to vanish. Time pressure comes largely from forces outside

ourselves: from a cutthroat economy; from the loss of the social safety nets

and family networks that used to help ease the burdens of work and

childcare; and from the sexist expectation that women must excel in their

careers while assuming most of the responsibilities at home. None of that

will be solved by self-help alone; as the journalist Anne Helen Petersen

writes in a widely shared essay on millennial burnout, you can’t fix such

problems “with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or ‘anxiety baking,’ or

the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats.” But my point here is

that however privileged or unfortunate your specific situation, fully facing

the reality of it can only help. So long as you continue to respond to

impossible demands on your time by trying to persuade yourself that you

might one day find some way to do the impossible, you’re implicitly

collaborating with those demands. Whereas once you deeply grasp that they

are impossible, you’ll be newly empowered to resist them, and to focus

instead on building the most meaningful life you can, in whatever situation

you’re in.

This notion that fulfillment might lie in embracing, rather than denying,

our temporal limitations wouldn’t have surprised the philosophers of

ancient Greece and Rome. They understood limitlessness to be the sole

preserve of the gods; the noblest of human goals wasn’t to become godlike,

but to be wholeheartedly human instead. In any case, this is just how reality

is, and it can be surprisingly energizing to confront it. Back in the 1950s, a

splendidly cranky British author named Charles Garfield Lott Du Cann

wrote a short book, Teach Yourself to Live, in which he recommended the

limit-embracing life, and he responded saltily to the suggestion that his

advice was depressing. “Depressing? Not a bit of it. No more depressing

than a cold [shower] is depressing…You are no longer befogged and

bewildered by a false and misleading illusion about your life—like most

people.” This is an excellent spirit in which to confront the challenge of

using time well. None of us can single-handedly overthrow a society

dedicated to limitless productivity, distraction, and speed. But right here,

right now, you can stop buying into the delusion that any of that is ever

going to bring satisfaction. You can face the facts. You can turn on the

shower, brace yourself for some invigoratingly icy water, and step in.

The Efficiency Trap

et’s begin with busyness. It isn’t our only time problem, and it isn’t

everyone’s problem. But it’s a uniquely vivid illustration of the

effort we invest in fighting against our built-in limitations, thanks to

how normal it has become to feel as though you absolutely must do more

than you can do. “Busyness” is a misnomer for this state of affairs, really,

because certain forms of busyness can be delightful. Who wouldn’t want to

live in Busytown, the setting of the iconic 1960s children’s books by the

American illustrator Richard Scarry? His grocer cats and firefighting pigs

are certainly busy; nobody in Busytown is idle—or if they are, they’re

carefully hidden from view by the authorities, Pyongyang-style. What they

aren’t, though, is overwhelmed. They exude the cheery self-possession of

cats and pigs who have plenty to do, but also every confidence that their

tasks will fit snugly into the hours available—whereas we live with the

constant anxiety of fearing, or knowing for certain, that ours won’t.

Research shows that this feeling arises on every rung of the economic

ladder. If you’re working two minimum-wage jobs to put food in your

children’s stomachs, there’s a good chance you’ll feel overstretched. But if

you’re better off, you’ll find yourself feeling overstretched for reasons that

seem, to you, no less compelling: because you have a nicer house with

higher mortgage payments, or because the demands of your (interesting,

well-paid) job conflict with your longing to spend time with your aging

parents, or to be more involved in your children’s lives, or to dedicate your

life to fighting climate change. As the law professor Daniel Markovits has

shown, even the winners in our achievement-obsessed culture—the ones

who make it to the elite universities, then reap the highest salaries—find

that their reward is the unending pressure to work with “crushing intensity”

in order to maintain the income and status that have come to seem like

prerequisites for the lives they want to lead.

It’s not just that this situation feels impossible; in strictly logical terms,

it really is impossible. It can’t be the case that you must do more than you

can do. That notion doesn’t make any sense: if you truly don’t have time for

everything you want to do, or feel you ought to do, or that others are

badgering you to do, then, well, you don’t have time—no matter how grave

the consequences of failing to do it all might prove to be. So, technically,

it’s irrational to feel troubled by an overwhelming to-do list. You’ll do what

you can, you won’t do what you can’t, and the tyrannical inner voice

insisting that you must do everything is simply mistaken. We rarely stop to

consider things so rationally, though, because that would mean confronting

the painful truth of our limitations. We would be forced to acknowledge that

there are hard choices to be made: which balls to let drop, which people to

disappoint, which cherished ambitions to abandon, which roles to fail at.

Maybe you can’t keep your current job while also seeing enough of your

children; maybe making sufficient time in the week for your creative calling

means you’ll never have an especially tidy home, or get quite as much

exercise as you should, and so on. Instead, in an attempt to avoid these

unpleasant truths, we deploy the strategy that dominates most conventional

advice on how to deal with busyness: we tell ourselves we’ll just have to

find a way to do more—to try to address our busyness, you could say, by

making ourselves busier still.

Sisyphus’s Inbox

This is a modern reaction to a modern problem, but it is not brand-new. In

1908, the English journalist Arnold Bennett published a short and grouchy

book of advice, the title of which demonstrated that this anxious effort to fit

more in was already afflicting his Edwardian world: How to Live on 24

Hours a Day. “Recently, in a daily organ, a battle raged round the question

[of] whether a woman can exist nicely in the country on £85 a year,”

Bennett wrote. “I have [also] seen an essay, ‘How to live on eight shillings

a week.’ But I have never seen an essay, ‘How to live on twenty-four hours

a day.’ ” The joke—to spell it out—is how absurd it is that anyone should

need such advice, since nobody has ever had more than twenty-four hours a

day in which to live. Yet people did need it: to Bennett and his target

audience, suburban professionals commuting by tram and train to office

jobs in England’s increasingly prosperous cities, time was starting to feel

like a container too small for all it was required to hold. He was writing, he

explained, for his “companions in distress—that innumerable band of souls

who are haunted, more or less painfully, by the feeling that the years slip by,

and slip by, and slip by, and that they have not yet been able to get their

lives into proper working order.” His blunt diagnosis was that most people

wasted several hours each day, especially in the evenings; they told

themselves they were tired when they could just as easily pull up their socks

and get on with all the life-enriching activities they claimed they never had

time for. “What I suggest,” wrote Bennett, “is that at six o’clock you look

facts in the face and admit that you are not tired (because you are not, you

know).” As an alternative strategy, he suggests rising earlier instead; his

book even contains instructions on how to brew your own tea, in case

you’re up before the servants.

How to Live on 24 Hours a Day is a wonderfully stimulating book, full

of practical suggestions that make it well worth reading today. But the

whole thing rests on one extremely dubious assumption (apart from the

assumption that you have servants, I mean). Like virtually every time

management expert who was to come after him, Bennett implies that if you

follow his advice, you’ll get enough of the genuinely important things done

to feel at peace with time. Fit a bit more activity into each day’s container,

he suggests, and you’ll reach the serene and commanding status of finally

having “enough time.” But that wasn’t true in 1908, and it’s even less true

today. This was what I had begun to grasp, on that park bench in Brooklyn,

and I still think it’s the single best antidote to the feeling of time pressure, a

splendidly liberating first step on the path of embracing your limits: the

problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important—or

just for enough of what feels important—is that you definitely never will.

The reason isn’t that you haven’t yet discovered the right time

management tricks or applied sufficient effort, or that you need to start

getting up earlier, or that you’re generally useless. It’s that the underlying

assumption is unwarranted: there’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel “on

top of things,” or make time for everything that matters, simply by getting

more done. For a start, what “matters” is subjective, so you’ve no grounds

for assuming that there will be time for everything that you, or your

employer, or your culture happens to deem important. But the other

exasperating issue is that if you succeed in fitting more in, you’ll find the

goalposts start to shift: more things will begin to seem important,

meaningful, or obligatory. Acquire a reputation for doing your work at

amazing speed, and you’ll be given more of it. (Your boss isn’t stupid: Why

would she give the extra work to someone slower?) Figure out how to

spend enough time with your kids and at the office, so you don’t feel guilty

about either, and you’ll suddenly feel some new social pressure: to spend

more time exercising or to join the parent-teacher association—oh, and isn’t

it finally time you learned to meditate? Get around to launching the side

business you’ve dreamed of for years, and if it succeeds, it won’t be long

before you’re no longer satisfied with keeping it small. The same goes for

chores: in her book More Work for Mother, the historian Ruth Schwartz

Cowan shows that when housewives first got access to “labor-saving”

devices like washing machines and vacuum cleaners, no time was saved at

all, because society’s standards of cleanliness simply rose to offset the

benefits; now that you could return each of your husband’s shirts to a

spotless condition after a single wearing, it began to feel like you should, to

show how much you loved him. “Work expands so as to fill the time

available for its completion,” the English humorist and historian C.

Northcote Parkinson wrote in 1955, coining what became known as

Parkinson’s law. But it’s not merely a joke, and it doesn’t apply only to

work. It applies to everything that needs doing. In fact, it’s the definition of

“what needs doing” that expands to fill the time available.

This whole painful irony is especially striking in the case of email, that

ingenious twentieth-century invention whereby any random person on the

planet can pester you, at any time they like, and at almost no cost to

themselves, by means of a digital window that sits inches from your nose,

or in your pocket, throughout your working day, and often on weekends,

too. The “input” side of this arrangement—the number of emails that you

could, in principle, receive—is essentially infinite. But the “output” side—

the number of messages you’ll have time to read properly, reply to, or just

make a considered decision to delete—is strictly finite. So getting better at

processing your email is like getting faster and faster at climbing up an

infinitely tall ladder: you’ll feel more rushed, but no matter how quickly

you go, you’ll never reach the top. In ancient Greek myth, the gods punish

King Sisyphus for his arrogance by sentencing him to push an enormous

boulder up a hill, only to see it roll back down again, an action he is

condemned to repeat for all eternity. In the contemporary version, Sisyphus

would empty his inbox, lean back, and take a deep breath, before hearing a

familiar ping: “You have new messages…”

It gets worse, though, because here the goalpost-shifting effect kicks in:

every time you reply to an email, there’s a good chance of provoking a

reply to that email, which itself may require another reply, and so on and so

on, until the heat death of the universe. At the same time, you’ll become

known as someone who responds promptly to email, so more people will

consider it worth their while to message you to begin with. (By contrast,

negligent emailers frequently find that forgetting to reply ends up saving

them time: people find alternative solutions to the problems they were

nagging you to solve, or the looming crisis they were emailing about never

materializes.) So it’s not simply that you never get through your email; it’s

that the process of “getting through your email” actually generates more

email. The general principle in operation is one you might call the

“efficiency trap.” Rendering yourself more efficient—either by

implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder

—won’t generally result in the feeling of having “enough time,” because,

all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits. Far

from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do.

For most of us, most of the time, it isn’t feasible to avoid the efficiency

trap altogether. After all, few of us are in a position not to attempt to get

through our email, even if the consequence is that we receive more email.

The same applies to life’s other responsibilities, too: we’re often obliged to

find ways to cram more into the same amount of time, even if we end up

feeling busier as a result. (Likewise, Schwartz Cowan’s early twentieth-

century housewives presumably felt that they couldn’t defy the social

pressure toward ever tidier and cleaner homes.) So I don’t mean to imply

that once you grasp what’s going on here, you’ll magically never feel busy

again.

But the choice you can make is to stop believing you’ll ever solve the

challenge of busyness by cramming more in, because that just makes

matters worse. And once you stop investing in the idea that you might one

day achieve peace of mind that way, it becomes easier to find peace of mind

in the present, in the midst of overwhelming demands, because you’re no

longer making your peace of mind dependent on dealing with all the

demands. Once you stop believing that it might somehow be possible to

avoid hard choices about time, it gets easier to make better ones. You begin

to grasp that when there’s too much to do, and there always will be, the only

route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of

getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.

The Bottomless Bucket List

All this talk of inboxes and washing machines risks giving the impression

that feeling overwhelmed is solely a matter of having too much to do at the

office or around the house. But there’s a deeper sense in which merely to be

alive on the planet today is to be haunted by the feeling of having “too

much to do,” whether or not you lead a busy life in any conventional sense.

Think of it as “existential overwhelm”: the modern world provides an

inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an

inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and

what you actually can do. As the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa

explains, premodern people weren’t much troubled by such thoughts, partly

because they believed in an afterlife: there was no particular pressure to

“get the most out of” their limited time, because as far as they were

concerned, it wasn’t limited, and in any case, earthly life was but a

relatively insignificant prelude to the most important part. They also tended

to see the world as unchanging through history or, in some cultures, as

cycling repeatedly through the same predictable stages. It felt like a known

quantity: you were content to play your role in the human drama—a role

that countless thousands had played before you, and thousands more would

play after your death—without any sense that you were missing out on the

exciting new possibilities of your particular moment in history. (In an

unchanging or cyclical view of history, there never are any exciting new

possibilities.) But secular modernity changes all that. When people stop

believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life.

And when people start believing in progress—in the idea that history is

headed toward an ever more perfect future—they feel far more acutely the

pain of their own little lifespan, which condemns them to missing out on

almost all of that future. And so they try to quell their anxieties by

cramming their lives with experience. In his translator’s introduction to

Rosa’s book Social Acceleration, Jonathan Trejo-Mathys writes:

The more we can accelerate our ability to go to different places, see new things, try new

foods, embrace various forms of spirituality, learn new activities, share sensual pleasures with

others whether it be in dancing or sex, experience different forms of art, and so on, the less

incongruence there is between the possibilities of experience we can realize in our own

lifetimes and the total array of possibilities available to human beings now and in the future—

that is, the closer we come to having a truly “fulfilled” life, in the literal sense of one that is as

filled full of experiences as it can possibly be.

So the retiree ticking exotic destinations off a bucket list and the

hedonist stuffing her weekends full of fun are arguably just as overwhelmed

as the exhausted social worker or corporate lawyer. It’s true that the things

by which they’re being overwhelmed are nominally more enjoyable; it’s

certainly nicer to have a long list of Greek islands left to visit than a long

list of homeless families left to find housing for, or a huge stack of contracts

left to proofread. But it remains the case that their fulfillment still seems to

depend on their managing to do more than they can do. This helps explain

why stuffing your life with pleasurable activities so often proves less

satisfying than you’d expect. It’s an attempt to devour the experiences the

world has to offer, to feel like you’ve truly lived—but the world has an

effectively infinite number of experiences to offer, so getting a handful of

them under your belt brings you no closer to a sense of having feasted on

life’s possibilities. Instead, you find yourself pitched straight back into the

efficiency trap. The more wonderful experiences you succeed in having, the

more additional wonderful experiences you start to feel you could have, or

ought to have, on top of all those you’ve already had, with the result that the

feeling of existential overwhelm gets worse.

Perhaps it goes without saying that the internet makes this all much

more agonizing, because it promises to help you make better use of your

time, while simultaneously exposing you to vastly more potential uses for

your time—so that the very tool you’re using to get the most out of life

makes you feel as though you’re missing out on even more of it. Facebook,

for example, is an extremely efficient way to stay informed about events

you might like to attend. But it’s also a guaranteed way to hear about more

events you’d like to attend than anyone possibly could attend. OkCupid is

an efficient way of finding people to date, but also of being constantly

reminded about all the other, potentially more alluring people you might be

dating instead. Email is an unparalleled tool for responding rapidly to a

large volume of messages—but then again, if it weren’t for email, you

wouldn’t be receiving all those messages in the first place. The technologies

we use to try to “get on top of everything” always fail us, in the end,

because they increase the size of the “everything” of which we’re trying to

get on top.

Why You Should Stop Clearing the Decks

So far, I’ve been writing as if the efficiency trap were a simple matter of

quantity: you have too much to do, so you try to fit more in, but the ironic

result is that you end up with more to do. The worst aspect of the trap,

though, is that it’s also a matter of quality. The harder you struggle to fit

everything in, the more of your time you’ll find yourself spending on the

least meaningful things. Adopt an ultra-ambitious time management system

that promises to take care of your entire to-do list, and you probably won’t

even get around to the most important items on that list. Dedicate your

retirement to seeing as much of the world as you possibly can, and you

probably won’t even get to see the most interesting parts.

The reason for this effect is straightforward: the more firmly you

believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure

you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of

your time. Whenever you encounter some potential new item for your to-do

list or your social calendar, you’ll be strongly biased in favor of accepting

it, because you’ll assume you needn’t sacrifice any other tasks or

opportunities in order to make space for it. Yet because in reality your time

is finite, doing anything requires sacrifice—the sacrifice of all the other

things you could have been doing with that stretch of time. If you never

stop to ask yourself if the sacrifice is worth it, your days will automatically

begin to fill not just with more things, but with more trivial or tedious

things, because they’ve never had to clear the hurdle of being judged more

important than something else. Commonly, these will be things that other

people want you to do, to make their lives easier, and which you didn’t

think to try to resist. The more efficient you get, the more you become “a

limitless reservoir for other people’s expectations,” in the words of the

management expert Jim Benson.

In my days as a paid-up productivity geek, it was this aspect of the

whole scenario that troubled me the most. Despite my thinking of myself as

the kind of person who got things done, it grew painfully clear that the

things I got done most diligently were the unimportant ones, while the

important ones got postponed—either forever or until an imminent deadline

forced me to complete them, to a mediocre standard and in a stressful rush.

The email from my newspaper’s IT department about the importance of

regularly changing my password would provoke me to speedy action,

though I could have ignored it entirely. (The clue was in the subject line,

where the words “PLEASE READ” are generally a sign you needn’t bother

reading what follows.) Meanwhile, the long message from an old friend

now living in New Delhi and research for the major article I’d been

planning for months would get ignored, because I told myself that such

tasks needed my full focus, which meant waiting until I had a good chunk

of free time and fewer small-but-urgent tasks tugging at my attention. And

so, instead, like the dutiful and efficient worker I was, I’d put my energy

into clearing the decks, cranking through the smaller stuff to get it out of the

way—only to discover that doing so took the whole day, that the decks

filled up again overnight anyway, and that the moment for responding to the

New Delhi email or for researching the milestone article never arrived. One

can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one

cares about the most.

What’s needed instead in such situations, I gradually came to

understand, is a kind of anti-skill: not the counter-productive strategy of

trying to make yourself more efficient, but rather a willingness to resist

such urges—to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not

being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to

fit more in. To approach your days in this fashion means, instead of clearing

the decks, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead on what’s truly of

greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that, as

you do so, the decks will be filling up further, with emails and errands and

other to-dos, many of which you may never get around to at all. You’ll

sometimes still decide to drive yourself hard in an effort to squeeze more in,

when circumstances absolutely require it. But that won’t be your default

mode, because you’ll no longer be operating under the illusion of one day

making time for everything.

The same goes for existential overwhelm: what’s required is the will to

resist the urge to consume more and more experiences, since that strategy

can only lead to the feeling of having even more experiences left to

consume. Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on

almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so

many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead,

you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually

do have time for—and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what

counts the most.

The Pitfalls of Convenience

There’s one further, especially insidious way in which the quest for

increased efficiency warps our relationship with time these days: the

seductive lure of convenience. Entire industries now thrive on the promise

of helping us cope with having an overwhelming amount to do by

eliminating or accelerating tedious and time-consuming chores. But the

result—in an irony that shouldn’t be too surprising by now—is that life gets

subtly worse. As with other manifestations of the efficiency trap, freeing up

time in this fashion backfires in terms of quantity, because the freed-up time

just fills with more things you feel you have to do, and also in terms of

quality, because in attempting to eliminate only the tedious experiences, we

accidentally end up eliminating things we didn’t realize we valued until

they were gone.

It works like this: In start-up jargon, the way to make a fortune in

Silicon Valley is to identify a “pain point”—one of the small annoyances

resulting from (more jargon) the “friction” of daily life—and then to offer a

way to circumvent it. Thus Uber eliminates the “pain” of having to track

down a number for your local taxi company and call it, or trying to hail a

cab in the street; digital wallet apps like Apple Pay remove the “pain” of

having to reach into your bag for your physical wallet or cash. The food

delivery service Seamless has even run advertisements—tongue-in-cheek

ones, but still—boasting that it lets you avoid the agony of talking to a

flesh-and-blood restaurant worker; instead, you need only commune with a

screen. It’s true that everything runs more smoothly this way. But

smoothness, it turns out, is a dubious virtue, since it’s often the unsmoothed

textures of life that make it livable, helping nurture the relationships that are

crucial for mental and physical health, and for the resilience of our

communities. Your loyalty to your local taxi firm is one of those delicate

social threads that, multiplied thousands of times, bind a neighborhood

together; your interactions with the woman who runs the nearby Chinese

takeout might feel insignificant, but they help make yours the kind of area

where people still talk to one another, where tech-induced loneliness

doesn’t yet reign supreme. (Take it from a work-from-home writer: a couple

of brief interactions with another human can make all the difference in a

day.) As for Apple Pay, I like a little friction when I buy something, since it

marginally increases the chance that I’ll resist a pointless purchase.

Convenience, in other words, makes things easy, but without regard to

whether easiness is truly what’s most valuable in any given context. Take

those services—on which I’ve relied too much in recent years—that let you

design and then remotely mail a birthday card, so you never see or touch the

physical item yourself. Better than nothing, perhaps. But sender and

recipient both know that it’s a poor substitute for purchasing a card in a

shop, writing on it by hand, and then walking to a mailbox to mail it,

because contrary to the cliché, it isn’t really the thought that counts, but the

effort—which is to say, the inconvenience. When you render the process

more convenient, you drain it of its meaning. The venture capitalist and

Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian has observed that we often “don’t even

realize something is broken until someone else shows us a better way.” But

the other reason we might not realize some everyday process is broken is

that it isn’t broken to begin with—and that the inconvenience involved,

which might look like brokenness from the outside, in fact embodies

something essentially human.

Frequently, the effect of convenience isn’t just that a given activity

starts to feel less valuable, but that we stop engaging in certain valuable

activities altogether, in favor of more convenient ones. Because you can

stay home, order food on Seamless, and watch sitcoms on Netflix, you find

yourself doing so—though you might be perfectly well aware that you’d

have had a better time had you kept your appointment to meet friends in the

city or tried to make an interesting new recipe. “I prefer to brew my coffee,”

the law professor Tim Wu writes in an essay on the pitfalls of convenience

culture, “but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I

‘prefer.’ ” Meanwhile, those aspects of life that resist being made to run

more smoothly start to seem repellent. “When you can skip the line and buy

concert tickets on your phone,” Wu points out, “waiting in line to vote in an

election is irritating.” As convenience colonizes everyday life, activities

gradually sort themselves into two types: the kind that are now far more

convenient, but that feel empty or out of sync with our true preferences; and

the kind that now seem intensely annoying, because of how inconvenient

they remain.

Resisting all this as an individual, or as a family, takes fortitude,

because the smoother life gets, the more perverse you’ll seem if you insist

on maintaining the rough edges by choosing the inconvenient way of doing

things. Get rid of your smartphone, quit using Google, or choose snail mail

over WhatsApp, and people are increasingly likely to question your sanity.

Still, it can be done. The Bible scholar and agriculturalist Sylvia Keesmaat

abandoned a full-time university position in Toronto because she was

following a hunch that her overwhelmed life—and the efficiencies and

conveniences it seemed to necessitate—were somehow undermining its

meaning. She moved with her husband and children to a farm in the vast

swath of the Canadian interior known as the Land Between, where each

winter day begins by lighting the fire that will warm the farmhouse and

provide heat for cooking:

Every morning I carefully scrape out the ash of yesterday…As I lay the kindling and listen for

the crackling of wood devouring flame, I wait. The house is cool, and all I have to do now for

the next few minutes is be attentive and patient. The fire needs time to build, needs to be fed

and nurtured into the strength of heat for cooking. If I walk away and leave it, it will die. If I

forget to pay attention, it will die. Of course, being fire, if I build it too big and forget to pay

attention, I could die. Why take the chance?

Someone once asked me how long it takes before I have my first, hot cup of tea in the

morning. Well, let’s see: in the winter I light the fire, sweep the floor, and wake the kids for

chores…I run water for the cows, get them some hay, give the chickens some grain and their

water, feed the ducks. Sometimes I help the kids with the horses and barn cats and then come

back in. Then I put the kettle on. Maybe I get something to drink within an hour of waking. If

things go well. An hour?

We needn’t dwell here on whether Keesmaat’s new, self-consciously

inconvenient way of life is intrinsically superior to the kind with central

heating, takeout food, and twice-daily commutes. (Although I think perhaps

it might be: her days do seem busy in exactly that agreeable, non-

overwhelmed, Richard Scarry sense of the word.) And obviously not

everyone has the option of pursuing precisely her sort of path. But the real

point is that her decision to make such a radical change arose from the

recognition that she’d never manage to build a more meaningful life—

which for her meant cultivating a more mindful relationship with her

family’s physical surroundings—by saving time and thereby squeezing

more into her existing one. To make time for what mattered, she needed to

give things up.

Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room

for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a

lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal

with the inevitable sense of loss that results. Keesmaat chose building fires

and growing food with her children. “How else are we to get to know this

place where we have been set, apart from tending to it?” she writes.

“Outside of planting the food we eat, how are we to learn the living

character of soil, the various needs of peppers, lettuce, and kale?” You

might make a very different choice, of course. But the undodgeable reality

of a finite human life is that you are going to have to choose.

Facing Finitude

ou can’t delve far into the question of what it means to be a finite

human being, with finite time on the planet, before encountering

the philosopher who was more obsessed with the subject than any

other thinker: Martin Heidegger. This is unfortunate for two reasons, the

most glaring one being that for more than a decade, starting in 1933, he was

a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party. (The question of what this means

for his philosophy is a fraught and fascinating one, but it would get us off

track here. So you’re going to have to decide for yourself whether this

exceptionally poor life choice invalidates his thoughts about how we make

life choices in general.) The second reason is that he’s almost impossible to

read. His work abounds with broken-backed phrases such as “Being-

towards-death” and “de-severance” and—you might like to be sitting down

for this next one—“anxiety ‘in the face of’ that potentiality-for-Being

which is one’s ownmost.” This is why nobody’s interpretation of

Heidegger’s work, very much including mine, ought to be taken as

definitive. Yet on this second charge, of incomprehensibility, he does have a

kind of defense. Everyday language reflects our everyday ways of seeing.

But Heidegger wants to slide his fingernails under the most basic elements

of existence—the things we barely notice because they’re so familiar—so

as to prize them away for our inspection. That means making things

unfamiliar, using unfamiliar terms. So you stumble and trip over his

writing, but sometimes, as a consequence, you bang your head against

reality.

Thrown into Time

The most fundamental thing we fail to appreciate about the world,

Heidegger asserts in his magnum opus, Being and Time, is how bafflingly

astonishing it is that it’s there at all—the fact that there is anything rather

than nothing. Most philosophers and scientists spend their careers

pondering the way things are: what sorts of things exist, where they come

from, how they relate to each other, and so on. But we’ve forgotten to be

amazed that things are in the first place—that “a world is worlding all

around us,” as Heidegger puts it. This fact—the fact that there is being, to

begin with—is “the brute reality on which all of us ought to be constantly

stubbing our toes,” in the splendid phrase of the writer Sarah Bakewell. But

instead, it almost always passes us by.

Having focused our attention on this ground-level issue of “being”

itself, Heidegger next turns to humans specifically, and to our own

particular kind of being. What does it mean for a human being to be? (I

realize this is starting to sound like a bad comedy sketch about philosophers

lost in wild abstractions. I’m afraid that’s going to get worse for another

couple of paragraphs before it gets better.) His answer is that our being is

totally, utterly bound up with our finite time. So bound up, in fact, that the

two are synonymous: to be, for a human, is above all to exist temporally, in

the stretch between birth and death, certain that the end will come, yet

unable to know when. We tend to speak about our having a limited amount

of time. But it might make more sense, from Heidegger’s strange

perspective, to say that we are a limited amount of time. That’s how

completely our limited time defines us.

Ever since Heidegger made this claim, philosophers have been

disagreeing about what exactly it might mean to say that we are time—

some have even argued it doesn’t mean anything—so we shouldn’t get

stuck on trying to clarify it with precision. It’s sufficient to take from it the

insight that every moment of a human existence is completely shot through

with the fact of what Heidegger calls our “finitude.” Our limited time isn’t

just one among various things we have to cope with; rather, it’s the thing

that defines us, as humans, before we start coping with anything at all.

Before I can ask a single question about what I should do with my time, I

find myself already thrown into time, into this particular moment, with my

particular life story, which has made me who I am and which I can never

get out from under. Looking ahead to the future, I find myself equally

constrained by my finitude: I’m being borne forward on the river of time,

with no possibility of stepping out of the flow, onward toward my inevitable

death—which, to make matters even more ticklish, could arrive at any

moment.

In this situation, any decision I make, to do anything at all with my

time, is already radically limited. For one thing, it’s limited in a

retrospective sense, because I’m already who I am and where I am, which

determines what possibilities are open to me. But it’s also radically limited

in a forward-looking sense, too, not least because a decision to do any given

thing will automatically mean sacrificing an infinite number of potential

alternative paths. As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day,

I’m building a life—but at one and the same time, I’m closing off the

possibility of countless others, forever. (The original Latin word for

“decide,” decidere, means “to cut off,” as in slicing away alternatives; it’s a

close cousin of words like “homicide” and “suicide.”) Any finite life—even

the best one you could possibly imagine—is therefore a matter of

ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.

The only real question about all this finitude is whether we’re willing to

confront it or not. And this, for Heidegger, is the central challenge of human

existence: since finitude defines our lives, he argues that living a truly

authentic life—becoming fully human—means facing up to that fact. We

must live out our lives, to whatever extent we can, in clear-eyed

acknowledgment of our limitations, in the undeluded mode of existence that

Heidegger calls “Being-towards-death,” aware that this is it, that life is not

a dress rehearsal, that every choice requires myriad sacrifices, and that time

is always already running out—indeed, that it may run out today, tomorrow,

or next month. And so it’s not merely a matter of spending each day “as if”

it were your last, as the cliché has it. The point is that it always actually

might be. I can’t entirely depend upon a single moment of the future.

Obviously, from any ordinary perspective, this all sounds intolerably

morbid and stressful. But then, to the extent that you manage to achieve this

outlook on life, you’re not seeing it from an ordinary perspective—and

“morbid and stressful,” at least according to Heidegger, are exactly what it

is not. On the contrary, it’s the only way for a finite human being to live

fully, to relate to other people as full-fledged humans, and to experience the

world as it truly is. What’s really morbid, from this perspective, is what

most of us do, most of the time, instead of confronting our finitude, which

is to indulge in avoidance and denial, or what Heidegger calls “falling.”

Rather than taking ownership of our lives, we seek out distractions, or lose

ourselves in busyness and the daily grind, so as to try to forget our real

predicament. Or we try to avoid the intimidating responsibility of having to

decide what to do with our finite time by telling ourselves that we don’t get

to choose at all—that we must get married, or remain in a soul-destroying

job, or anything else, simply because it’s the done thing. Or, as we saw in

the previous chapter, we embark on the futile attempt to “get everything

done,” which is really another way of trying to evade the responsibility of

deciding what to do with your finite time—because if you actually could

get everything done, you’d never have to choose among mutually exclusive

possibilities. Life is usually more comfortable when you spend it avoiding

the truth in this fashion. But it’s a stultifying, deadly sort of comfort. It’s

only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic

relationship with life.

Getting Real

In his 2019 book, This Life, the Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund

makes this all a bit clearer and less mystical by juxtaposing the idea of

facing our finitude with the religious belief in an eternal life. If you really

thought life would never end, he argues, then nothing could ever genuinely

matter, because you’d never be faced with having to decide whether or not

to use a portion of your precious life on something. “If I believed that my

life would last forever,” Hägglund writes, “I could never take my life to be

at stake, and I would never be seized by the need to do anything with my

time.” Eternity would be deathly dull, because whenever you found

yourself wondering whether or not to do any given thing, on any given day,

the answer would always be: Who cares? After all, there’s always

tomorrow, and the next day, and the one after that…Hägglund quotes a

headline from the magazine U.S. Catholic that has the air of being written

by a devout religious believer on whom an awful possibility has suddenly

dawned: “Heaven: Will It Be Boring?”

By way of contrast, Hägglund describes the annual summer vacation he

spends with his extended family in a house on Sweden’s wind-battered

Baltic coast. It’s intrinsic to the value of this experience, he notes, that he

won’t be around to experience it forever, that his relatives won’t either, that

his relationships with his relatives are therefore temporary, too—and that

even the coastline, in its current form, is a transient phenomenon, as dry

land continues to emerge from the twelve-thousand-year retreat of the

region’s glaciers. If Hägglund were guaranteed an infinity of these summer

vacations, there’d be nothing much to value about any one of them; it’s only

the guarantee that he definitely won’t have an infinity of them that makes

them worth valuing. Indeed, it’s also only from this position of valuing

what is finite because it’s finite, Hägglund argues, that one can truly care

about the impact of a collective peril such as climate change, which is

wreaking changes to his native country’s landscape. If our earthly existence

were merely the prelude to an eternity in heaven, threats to that existence

couldn’t matter in any ultimate sense.

Of course, if you’re not religious, and maybe even if you are, you might

not literally believe in eternal life. But anyone who spends their days failing

to confront the truth of their finitude—convincing themselves, on a

subconscious level, that they have all the time in the world, or alternatively

that they’ll be able to cram an infinite amount into the time they do have—

is essentially in the same boat. They’re living in denial of the fact that their

time is limited; so when it comes to deciding how to use any given portion

of that time, nothing can genuinely be at stake for them. It is by consciously

confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of

death, that we finally become truly present for our lives.

This is the kernel of wisdom in the cliché of the celebrity who claims

that a brush with cancer was “the best thing that ever happened” to them: it

pitches them into a more authentic mode of being, in which everything

suddenly feels more vividly meaningful. Such accounts sometimes give the

impression that people reliably become happier as a result of facing the

truth about death, which isn’t the case; “happier” is clearly the wrong word

for the new depth that is added to life when you grasp, deep in your bones,

the fact that you’re going to die and that your time is therefore severely

limited. But things certainly do get realer. As she recalls in her memoir The

Iceberg, the British sculptor Marion Coutts was taking her two-year-old son

to his first day with a new caregiver when her husband, the art critic Tom

Lubbock, came to find her to tell her about the malignant brain tumor from

which he was to die within three years:

Something has happened. A piece of news. We have had a diagnosis that has the status of an

event. The news makes a rupture with what went before: clean, complete and total, save in

one respect. It seems that after the event, the decision we make is to remain. Our [family] unit

stands…

We learn something. We are mortal. You might say you know this but you don’t. The

news falls neatly between one moment and another. You would not think there was a gap for

such a thing…It is as if a new physical law has been described for us bespoke: absolute as all

the others are, yet terrifyingly casual. It is a law of perception. It says, You will lose

everything that catches your eye.

In case this needs saying, it isn’t that a diagnosis of terminal illness, or a

bereavement, or any other encounter with death is somehow good, or

desirable, or “worth it.” But such experiences, however wholly unwelcome,

often appear to leave those who undergo them in a new and more honest

relationship with time. The question is whether we might attain at least a

little of that same outlook in the absence of the experience of agonizing

loss. Writers have struggled to convey the particular quality that this mode

of being infuses into life, because while “happier” is wrong, “sadder”

doesn’t convey it, either. You might call it “bright sadness” (as does the

priest and author Richard Rohr), “stubborn gladness” (the poet Jack

Gilbert), or “sober joy” (the Heidegger scholar Bruce Ballard). Or you

could just call it finally encountering real life, and the brute fact of our

finite weeks.

Everything Is Borrowed Time

This is the point at which I should come clean and admit that, unfortunately,

I don’t live my own daily life in a permanent state of unflinching

acceptance of my mortality. Perhaps nobody does. What I can confirm,

though, is that if you can adopt the outlook we’re exploring here even just a

little—if you can hold your attention, however briefly or occasionally, on

the sheer astonishingness of being, and on what a small amount of that

being you get—you may experience a palpable shift in how it feels to be

here, right now, alive in the flow of time. (Or as the flow of time, a

Heideggerian might say.) From an everyday standpoint, the fact that life is

finite feels like a terrible insult, “a sort of personal affront, a taking-away of

one’s time,” in the words of one scholar. There you were, planning to live

on forever—as the old Woody Allen line has it, not in the hearts of your

countrymen, but in your apartment—but now here comes mortality, to steal

away the life that was rightfully yours.

Yet, on reflection, there’s something very entitled about this attitude.

Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality the

outrageous violation? Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand

weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity,

rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks

than if you had never been born? Surely only somebody who’d failed to

notice how remarkable it is that anything is, in the first place, would take

their own being as such a given—as if it were something they had every

right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. So maybe

it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe

it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at

all.

The Canadian writer David Cain understood all this with a jolt in the

summer of 2018 when he attended an event in the Greektown district of

Toronto. The evening itself passed off unremarkably: “I was early,” he

recalled, “so I spent some time in a nearby park, then checked out the shops

and restaurants on Danforth Avenue. I stopped in front of a church to tie my

shoe. I remember being nervous about meeting a bunch of new people.”

Then, two weeks later, on the same stretch of street, a deranged man shot

fourteen people, killing two of them, then killing himself. Rationally

speaking, Cain concedes, this wasn’t a narrow escape on his part; thousands

of people walk down Danforth Avenue every day, and it wasn’t as if he’d

missed the shooting by only a few minutes. Even so, the sense that it could

have been him caught in that gunfire was sufficiently powerful to bring into

focus what it meant that it hadn’t been him. “When I watched videos of

eye-witness accounts, including some in front of the church where I tied my

shoes and the corner where I nervously loitered,” he wrote later, “it gave me

a vital bit of perspective: I happen to be alive, and there’s no cosmic law

entitling me to that status. Being alive is just happenstance, and not one

more day of it is guaranteed.”

This kind of perspective shift, I’ve found, has an especially striking

effect on the experience of everyday annoyances—on my response to traffic

jams and airport security lines, babies who won’t sleep past 5:00 a.m., and

dishwashers that I apparently must unload again tonight, even though (I

think you’ll find!) I did so yesterday. I’m embarrassed to admit what an

outsize negative effect such minor frustrations have had on my happiness

over the years. Fairly often, they still do; but the effect was worst at the

height of my productivity geekhood, because when you’re trying to Master

Your Time, few things are more infuriating than a task or delay that’s

foisted upon you against your will, with no regard for the schedule you’ve

painstakingly drawn up in your overpriced notebook. But when you turn

your attention instead to the fact that you’re in a position to have an

irritating experience in the first place, matters are liable to look very

different indeed. All at once, it can seem amazing to be there at all, having

any experience, in a way that’s overwhelmingly more important than the

fact that the experience happens to be an annoying one. Geoff Lye, a British

environmental consultant, once told me that after the sudden and premature

death of his friend and colleague David Watson, he would find himself

stuck in traffic, not clenching his fists in agitation, as per usual, but

wondering: “What would David have given to be caught in this traffic

jam?” It was the same for queues in supermarkets and customer service

lines that kept him on hold too long. Lye’s focus was no longer exclusively

on what he was doing in such moments or what he’d rather be doing

instead; now, he noticed also that he was doing it, with an upwelling of

gratitude that took him by surprise.

And now consider what all this means for the crucial and basic question

of choosing what to do with your limited time. As we’ve seen, it’s a fact of

life that, as a finite human, you’re always making hard choices—so that, for

example, in spending this afternoon on one thing that mattered to me

(writing), I necessarily had to forgo many other things that mattered too

(like playing with my son). It’s natural to see this situation as highly

regrettable, and to yearn for some alternative version of existence in which

we wouldn’t have to choose between valued activities in this way. But if it’s

amazing to have been granted any being at all—if “your whole life is

borrowed time,” as Cain realized, watching news reports of the Danforth

Avenue shootings—then wouldn’t it make more sense to speak not of

having to make such choices, but of getting to make them? From this

viewpoint, the situation starts to seem much less regrettable: each moment

of decision becomes an opportunity to select from an enticing menu of

possibilities, when you might easily never have been presented with the

menu to begin with. And it stops making sense to pity yourself for having

been cheated of all the other options.

In this situation, making a choice—picking one item from the menu—

far from representing some kind of defeat, becomes an affirmation. It’s a

positive commitment to spend a given portion of time doing this instead of

that—actually, instead of an infinite number of other “thats”—because this,

you’ve decided, is what counts the most right now. In other words, it’s

precisely the fact that I could have chosen a different and perhaps equally

valuable way to spend this afternoon that bestows meaning on the choice I

did make. And the same applies, of course, to an entire lifetime. For

instance, it’s precisely the fact that getting married forecloses the possibility

of meeting someone else—someone who might genuinely have been a

better marriage partner; who could ever say?—that makes marriage

meaningful. The exhilaration that sometimes arises when you grasp this

truth about finitude has been called the “joy of missing out,” by way of a

deliberate contrast with the idea of the “fear of missing out.” It is the

thrilling recognition that you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do

everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on, your

choices couldn’t truly mean anything. In this state of mind, you can

embrace the fact that you’re forgoing certain pleasures, or neglecting

certain obligations, because whatever you’ve decided to do instead—earn

money to support your family, write your novel, bathe the toddler, pause on

a hiking trail to watch a pale winter sun sink below the horizon at dusk—is

how you’ve chosen to spend a portion of time that you never had any right

to expect.

Becoming a Better Procrastinator

erhaps we’re in danger of getting a little too metaphysical about all

this, though. Many of the philosophers who’ve pondered the subject

of human finitude have been reluctant to translate their observations

into practical advice, because that smacks of self-help. (And heaven forbid

that anyone might want to help themselves!) Yet their insights do have

concrete ramifications for daily life. Apart from anything else, they make it

clear that the core challenge of managing our limited time isn’t about how

to get everything done—that’s never going to happen—but how to decide

most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it. As

the American author and teacher Gregg Krech puts it, we need to learn to

get better at procrastinating. Procrastination of some kind is

inevitable:indeed, at any given moment, you’ll be procrastinating on almost

everything, and by the end of your life, you’ll have gotten around to doing

virtually none of the things you theoretically could have done. So the point

isn’t to eradicate procrastination, but to choose more wisely what you’re

going to procrastinate on, in order to focus on what matters most. The real

measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you

neglect the right things.

A large proportion of them don’t. They make matters worse. Most

productivity experts act merely as enablers of our time troubles, by offering

ways to keep on believing it might be possible to get everything done.

Perhaps you’re familiar with the extraordinarily irritating parable of the

rocks in the jar, which was first inflicted upon the world in Stephen Covey’s

1994 book, First Things First, and which has been repeated ad nauseam in

productivity circles ever since. In the version with which I’m most familiar,

a teacher arrives in class one day carrying several sizable rocks, some

pebbles, a bag of sand, and a large glass jar. He issues a challenge to his

students: Can they fit all the rocks, pebbles, and sand into the jar? The

students, who are apparently rather slow-witted, try putting the pebbles or

the sand in first, only to find that the rocks won’t fit. Eventually—and no

doubt with a condescending smile—the teacher demonstrates the solution:

he puts the rocks in first, then the pebbles, then the sand, so that the smaller

items nestle comfortably in the spaces between the larger ones. The moral is

that if you make time for the most important things first, you’ll get them all

done and have plenty of room for less important things besides. But if you

don’t approach your to-do list in this order, you’ll never fit the bigger things

in at all.

Here the story ends—but it’s a lie. The smug teacher is being dishonest.

He has rigged his demonstration by bringing only a few big rocks into the

classroom, knowing they’ll all fit into the jar. The real problem of time

management today, though, isn’t that we’re bad at prioritizing the big rocks.

It’s that there are too many rocks—and most of them are never making it

anywhere near that jar. The critical question isn’t how to differentiate

between activities that matter and those that don’t, but what to do when far

too many things feel at least somewhat important, and therefore arguably

qualify as big rocks. Fortunately, a handful of wiser minds have addressed

exactly this dilemma, and their counsel coalesces around three main

principles.

The Art of Creative Neglect

Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time. I’m

borrowing this phrasing from the graphic novelist and creativity coach

Jessica Abel, who borrowed it in turn from the world of personal finance,

where it’s long been an article of faith because it works. If you take a

portion of your paycheck the day you receive it and squirrel it away into

savings or investments, or use it for paying off debts, you’ll probably never

feel the absence of that cash; you’ll go about your business—buying your

groceries, paying your bills—precisely as if you’d never had that portion of

money to begin with. (There are limits, of course: this plan won’t work if

you literally earn only enough to survive.) But if, like most people, you

“pay yourself last” instead—buying what you need and hoping there’ll be

some money remaining at the end to put into savings—you’ll usually find

that there isn’t any. And this won’t necessarily be because you frittered it

away self-indulgently, on lattes, or pedicures, or new electronic gadgets, or

heroin. Every expenditure might have felt eminently sensible and necessary

in the moment that you made it. The trouble is that we’re terrible at long-

range planning: if something feels like a priority now, it’s virtually

impossible to coolly assess whether it will still feel that way in a week or a

month. And so we naturally err on the side of spending—then feel bad later

when there’s nothing left over to save.

The same logic, Abel points out, applies to time. If you try to find time

for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important

demands on your time, in the hope that there’ll be some left over at the end,

you’ll be disappointed. So if a certain activity really matters to you—a

creative project, say, though it could just as easily be nurturing a

relationship, or activism in the service of some cause—the only way to be

sure it will happen is to do some of it today, no matter how little, and no

matter how many other genuinely big rocks may be begging for your

attention. After years of trying and failing to make time for her illustration

work, by taming her to-do list and shuffling her schedule, Abel saw that her

only viable option was to claim time instead—to just start drawing, for an

hour or two, every day, and to accept the consequences, even if those

included neglecting other activities she sincerely valued. “If you don’t save

a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week,” as she puts it, “there is

no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything

and have loads of free time.” This is the same insight embodied in two

venerable pieces of time management advice: to work on your most

important project for the first hour of each day, and to protect your time by

scheduling “meetings” with yourself, marking them in your calendar so that

other commitments can’t intrude. Thinking in terms of “paying yourself

first” transforms these one-off tips into a philosophy of life, at the core of

which lies this simple insight: if you plan to spend some of your four

thousand weeks doing what matters most to you, then at some point you’re

just going to have to start doing it.

The second principle is to limit your work in progress. Perhaps the most

appealing way to resist the truth about your finite time is to initiate a large

number of projects at once; that way, you get to feel as though you’re

keeping plenty of irons in the fire and making progress on all fronts.

Instead, what usually ends up happening is that you make progress on no

fronts—because each time a project starts to feel difficult, or frightening, or

boring, you can bounce off to a different one instead. You get to preserve

your sense of being in control of things, but at the cost of never finishing

anything important.

The alternative approach is to fix a hard upper limit on the number of

things that you allow yourself to work on at any given time. In their book

Personal Kanban, which explores this strategy in detail, the management

experts Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry suggest no more than

three items. Once you’ve selected those tasks, all other incoming demands

on your time must wait until one of the three items has been completed,

thereby freeing up a slot. (It’s also permissible to free up a slot by

abandoning a project altogether if it isn’t working out. The point isn’t to

force yourself to finish absolutely everything you start, but rather to banish

the bad habit of keeping an ever-proliferating number of half-finished

projects on the back burner.)

Making this rather modest change to my working practices produced a

startlingly large effect. It was no longer possible for me to ignore the fact

that my capacity for work was strictly finite—because each time I selected

a new task from my to-do list, as one of my three work-in-progress items, I

was obliged to contemplate all those I’d inevitably be neglecting in order to

focus on it. And yet precisely because I was being forced to confront reality

in this way—to see that I was always neglecting most tasks, in order to

work on anything at all, and that working on everything at once simply

wasn’t an option—the result was a powerful sense of undistracted calm, and

a lot more productivity than in my days as a productivity obsessive.

Another happy consequence was that I found myself effortlessly breaking

down my projects into manageable chunks, a strategy I’d long agreed with

in theory but never properly implemented. Now it became the intuitive

thing to do: it was clear that if I nominated “write book” or “move house”

as one of my three tasks in progress, it would clog up the system for

months, so I was naturally motivated to figure out the next achievable step

in each case instead. Rather than trying to do everything, I found it easier to

accept the truth that I’d be doing only a few things on any given day. The

difference, this time, was that I actually did them.

The third principle is to resist the allure of middling priorities. There is

a story attributed to Warren Buffett—although probably only in the

apocryphal way in which wise insights get attributed to Albert Einstein or

the Buddha, regardless of their real source—in which the famously shrewd

investor is asked by his personal pilot about how to set priorities. I’d be

tempted to respond, “Just focus on flying the plane!” But apparently this

didn’t take place midflight, because Buffett’s advice is different: he tells the

man to make a list of the top twenty-five things he wants out of life and

then to arrange them in order, from the most important to the least. The top

five, Buffett says, should be those around which he organizes his time. But

contrary to what the pilot might have been expecting to hear, the remaining

twenty, Buffett allegedly explains, aren’t the second-tier priorities to which

he should turn when he gets the chance. Far from it. In fact, they’re the ones

he should actively avoid at all costs—because they’re the ambitions

insufficiently important to him to form the core of his life yet seductive

enough to distract him from the ones that matter most.

You needn’t embrace the specific practice of listing out your goals (I

don’t, personally) to appreciate the underlying point, which is that in a

world of too many big rocks, it’s the moderately appealing ones—the fairly

interesting job opportunity, the semi-enjoyable friendship—on which a

finite life can come to grief. It’s a self-help cliché that most of us need to

get better at learning to say no. But as the writer Elizabeth Gilbert points

out, it’s all too easy to assume that this merely entails finding the courage to

decline various tedious things you never wanted to do in the first place. In

fact, she explains, “it’s much harder than that. You need to learn how to

start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you

have only one life.”

Perfection and Paralysis

If skillful time management is best understood as a matter of learning to

procrastinate well, by facing the truth about your finitude and making your

choices accordingly, then the other kind of procrastination—the bad kind,

which prevents us from making progress on the work that matters to us—is

usually the result of trying to avoid that truth. The good procrastinator

accepts the fact that she can’t get everything done, then decides as wisely as

possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect. By contrast, the bad

procrastinator finds himself paralyzed precisely because he can’t bear the

thought of confronting his limitations. For him, procrastination is a strategy

of emotional avoidance—a way of trying not to feel the psychological

distress that comes with acknowledging that he’s a finite human being.

The limitations we’re trying to avoid when we engage in this self-

defeating sort of procrastination frequently don’t have anything to do with

how much we’ll be able to get done in the time available; usually, it’s a

matter of worrying that we won’t have the talent to produce work of

sufficient quality, or that others won’t respond to it as we’d like them to, or

that in some other way things won’t turn out as we want. The philosopher

Costica Bradatan illustrates the point by means of a fable about an architect

from Shiraz in Persia who designed the world’s most beautiful mosque: a

breathtaking structure, dazzlingly original yet classically well proportioned,

awe-inspiring in its grandeur yet wholly unpretentious. All those who saw

the architectural plans wanted to buy them, or steal them; famous builders

begged him to let them take on the job. But the architect locked himself in

his study and stared at the plans for three days and nights—then burned

them all. He might have been a genius, but he was also a perfectionist: the

mosque of his imagination was perfect, and it agonized him to contemplate

the compromises that would be involved in making it real. Even the greatest

of builders would inevitably fail to reproduce his plans absolutely

faithfully; nor would he be able to protect his creation from the ravages of

time—from the physical decay or marauding armies that would eventually

reduce it to dust. Stepping into the world of finitude, by actually building

the mosque, would mean confronting all that he couldn’t do. Better to

cherish an ideal fantasy than to resign himself to reality, with all its

limitations and unpredictability.

Bradatan argues that when we find ourselves procrastinating on

something important to us, we’re usually in some version of this same

mindset. We fail to see, or refuse to accept, that any attempt to bring our

ideas into concrete reality must inevitably fall short of our dreams, no

matter how brilliantly we succeed in carrying things off—because reality,

unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don’t have limitless control, and can’t

possibly hope to meet our perfectionist standards. Something—our limited

talents, our limited time, our limited control over events, and over the

actions of other people—will always render our creation less than perfect.

Dispiriting as this might sound at first, it contains a liberating message: if

you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a

good enough job, you can relax—because judged by the flawless standards

of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you

might as well make a start.

And this sort of finitude-avoiding procrastination certainly isn’t

confined to the world of work. It’s a major issue in relationships, too, where

a similar refusal to face the truth about finitude can keep people mired in a

miserably tentative mode of existence for years on end. By way of a

cautionary tale, consider the case of the worst boyfriend ever, Franz Kafka,

whose most important romantic liaison began one summer evening in

Prague in 1912, when he was twenty-nine. Dining that night at the home of

his friend Max Brod, Kafka met his host’s cousin, Felice Bauer, who was

visiting from Berlin. She was an independent-minded twenty-four-year-old,

already enjoying professional success at a manufacturing company in

Germany, and her down-to-earth vigor appealed to the neurotic, self-

conscious Kafka. We know little of the strength of feeling in the other

direction, since only Kafka’s account survives, but he was smitten, and soon

a relationship began.

Or it began, at least, in correspondence form: over the next five years,

the couple exchanged hundreds of letters yet met only a handful of times,

each meeting apparently a source of agony for Kafka. Seven months after

their first encounter, he finally agreed to meet a second time, but sent a

telegram on the morning in question to say he wasn’t coming; then he

showed up anyway but acted morose. When the couple eventually got

engaged, Bauer’s parents held a celebratory reception; but attending it,

Kafka confided to his diary, made him feel “tied hand and foot like a

criminal.” Shortly afterward, during a rendezvous at a Berlin hotel, Kafka

called off the engagement, but the letters continued. (Though Kafka was

indecisive about those too: “It is quite right that we should stop this

business of so many letters,” he wrote to Bauer on one occasion, apparently

in response to a suggestion of hers. “Yesterday I even started a letter on this

subject, which I will send tomorrow.”) Two years later, the engagement was

back on, but only for a while: in 1917, Kafka used the onset of tuberculosis

as an excuse to cancel it a second and final time. It was presumably with

some relief that Bauer married a banker, had two children, and moved to the

United States, where she opened a successful knitwear firm—leaving

behind her a liaison characterized by so many nightmarish and

unpredictable reversals it’s impossible to resist describing it as Kafkaesque.

It might be easy to file Kafka away under the heading of “tortured

genius,” a remote figure with little relevance to our more ordinary lives. But

the truth, as the critic Morris Dickstein writes, is that his “neuroses are no

different from ours, no more freakish: only more intense, more pure…[and]

driven by genius to an integrity of unhappiness that most of us never

approach.” Like the rest of us, Kafka railed at reality’s constraints. He was

indecisive in love, and in much else, because he yearned to live more than

one life: to be a respectable citizen, which was why he kept his day job as

an insurance claims investigator; to relate intimately to another person in

marriage, which would mean marrying Bauer; and yet also to dedicate

himself without compromise to his writing. On more than one occasion, in

letters to Bauer, he characterized this struggle as a matter of “two selves”

wrestling with each other inside him—one in love with her but the other so

consumed by literature that “the death of his dearest friend would seem to

be no more than a hindrance” to his work.

The degree of agony here might be extreme, but the essential tension is

the same one felt by anybody torn between work and family, between a day

job and a creative calling, a hometown and the big city, or any other clash

of possible lives. And Kafka responded like the rest of us, too, by trying not

to confront the problem. Confining his relationship with Bauer to the realm

of letters meant that he could cling to the possibility of a life of intimacy

with her without allowing it to compete with his mania for work, as a real-

life relationship necessarily would. This effort to dodge the implications of

finitude doesn’t always manifest itself in commitment-phobia like Kafka’s:

some people do commit outwardly to a relationship but hold back from full

emotional commitment on the inside. Others find themselves years into

threadbare marriages they actually should leave but don’t, because they

want to keep open the possibility that their relationship might yet blossom

into a long and contented one, and also the option of exercising their

freedom to leave at some future date. It’s all the same essential evasion,

though. At one point, a desperate-sounding Bauer advised her fiancé to try

to “live more in the real world.” But that was precisely what Kafka was

seeking to avoid.

Six hundred miles away in Paris, and two decades before Franz met

Felice, the French philosopher Henri Bergson tunneled to the heart of

Kafka’s problem in his book Time and Free Will. We invariably prefer

indecision over committing ourselves to a single path, Bergson wrote,

because “the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the

same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally

possible.” In other words, it’s easy for me to fantasize about, say, a life

spent achieving stellar professional success, while also excelling as a parent

and partner, while also dedicating myself to training for marathons or

lengthy meditation retreats or volunteering in my community—because so

long as I’m only fantasizing, I get to imagine all of them unfolding

simultaneously and flawlessly. As soon as I start trying to live any of those

lives, though, I’ll be forced to make trade-offs—to put less time than I’d

like into one of those domains, so as to make space for another—and to

accept that nothing I do will go perfectly anyway, with the result that my

actual life will inevitably prove disappointing by comparison with the

fantasy. “The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is

thus more fruitful than the future itself,” Bergson wrote, “and this is why

we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”

Once again, the seemingly dispiriting message here is actually a liberating

one. Since every real-world choice about how to live entails the loss of

countless alternative ways of living, there’s no reason to procrastinate, or to

resist making commitments, in the anxious hope that you might somehow

be able to avoid those losses. Loss is a given. That ship has sailed—and

what a relief.

The Inevitability of Settling

Which brings me to one of the few pieces of dating advice I feel entirely

confident in delivering, though in fact it’s relevant in every other sphere of

life, too. It concerns “settling”—the ubiquitous modern fear that you might

find yourself committing to a romantic partner who falls short of your ideal,

or who’s unworthy of your excellent personality. (The career-related version

of this worry entails “settling” for a job that pays the bills rather than going

all-in on your passion.) The received wisdom, articulated in a thousand

magazine articles and inspirational Instagram memes, is that it’s always a

crime to settle. But the received wisdom is wrong. You should definitely

settle.

Or to be more precise, you don’t have a choice. You will settle—and

this fact ought to please you. The American political theorist Robert Goodin

wrote a whole treatise on this topic, On Settling, in which he demonstrates,

to start with, that we’re inconsistent when it comes to what we define as

“settling.” Everyone seems to agree that if you embark on a relationship

when you secretly suspect you could find someone better, you’re guilty of

settling, because you’re opting to use up a portion of your life with a less-

than-ideal partner. But since time is finite, the decision to refuse to settle—

to spend a decade restlessly scouring online dating networks for the perfect

person—is also a case of settling, because you’re opting to use up a decade

of your limited time in a different sort of less-than-ideal situation.

Moreover, Goodin observes, we tend to contrast a life of settling with a life

of what he labels “striving,” or living life to the fullest. But this is a

mistake, too, and not just because settling is unavoidable but also because

living life to the fullest requires settling. “You must settle, in a relatively

enduring way, upon something that will be the object of your striving, in

order for that striving to count as striving,” he writes: you can’t become an

ultrasuccessful lawyer or artist or politician without first “settling” on law,

or art, or politics, and therefore deciding to forgo the potential rewards of

other careers. If you flit between them all, you’ll succeed in none of them.

Likewise, there’s no possibility of a romantic relationship being truly

fulfilling unless you’re willing, at least for a while, to settle for that specific

relationship, with all its imperfections—which means spurning the

seductive lure of an infinite number of superior imaginary alternatives.

Of course, we rarely approach relationships with such wisdom. Instead,

we spend years failing to fully commit to any one relationship—either by

finding a reason to call things off as soon as a serious liaison starts to look

likely or by only halfheartedly showing up for whatever relationship we’re

in. Or, alternatively, in a pattern that every experienced psychotherapist has

encountered a hundred times, we do commit—but then, after three or four

years, start thinking about breaking things off, convinced that our partner’s

psychological issues are making things impossible, or that we’re not as

compatible as we’d believed. Either of these might conceivably be true in

certain cases; people are sometimes guilty of spectacularly bad choices in

love, and in other domains as well. But more often, the real problem is just

that the other person is one other person. In other words, the cause of your

difficulties isn’t that your partner is especially flawed, or that the two of you

are especially incompatible, but that you’re finally noticing all the ways in

which your partner is (inevitably) finite, and thus deeply disappointing by

comparison with the world of your fantasy, where the limiting rules of

reality don’t apply.

The point that Bergson made about the future—that it’s more appealing

than the present because you get to indulge in all your hopes for it, even if

they contradict each other—is no less true of fantasy romantic partners,

who can easily exhibit a range of characteristics that simply couldn’t

coexist in one person in the real world. It’s common, for example, to enter a

relationship unconsciously hoping that your partner will provide both an

unlimited sense of stability and an unlimited sense of excitement—and

then, when that’s not what transpires, to assume that the problem is your

partner and that these qualities might coexist in someone else, whom you

should therefore set off to find. The reality is that the demands are

contradictory. The qualities that make someone a dependable source of

excitement are generally the opposite of those that make him or her a

dependable source of stability. Seeking both in one real human isn’t much

less absurd than dreaming of a partner who’s both six and five feet tall.

And not only should you settle; ideally, you should settle in a way that

makes it harder to back out, such as moving in together, or getting married,

or having a child. The great irony of all our efforts to avoid facing finitude

—to carry on believing that it might be possible not to have to choose

between mutually exclusive options—is that when people finally do choose,

in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result.

We’ll do almost anything to avoid burning our bridges, to keep alive the

fantasy of a future unconstrained by limitation, yet having burned them,

we’re generally pleased that we did so. Once, in an experiment, the Harvard

University social psychologist Daniel Gilbert and a colleague gave

hundreds of people the opportunity to pick a free poster from a selection of

art prints. Then he divided the participants into two groups. The first group

was told that they had a month in which they could exchange their poster

for any other one; the second group was told that the decision they’d

already made had been final. In follow-up surveys, it was the latter group—

those who were stuck with their decision, and who thus weren’t distracted

by the thought that it might still be possible to make a better choice—who

showed by far the greater appreciation for the work of art they’d selected.

Not that we necessarily need psychologists to prove the point. Gilbert’s

study reflects an insight that’s deeply embedded in numerous cultural

traditions, most obviously that of marriage. When two spouses agree to stay

together “for better or worse,” rather than bolting as soon as the going gets

tough, they’re making an agreement that not only will help them weather

the rough patches, but that also promises to make the good times more

fulfilling, too—because having committed themselves to one finite course

of action, they’ll be much less likely to spend that time pining after

fantastical alternatives. In consciously making a commitment, they’re

closing off their fantasies of infinite possibility in favor of what I described,

in the previous chapter, as the “joy of missing out”: the recognition that the

renunciation of alternatives is what makes their choice a meaningful one in

the first place. This is also why it can be so unexpectedly calming to take

actions you’d been fearing or delaying—to finally hand in your notice at

work, become a parent, address a festering family issue, or close on a house

purchase. When you can no longer turn back, anxiety falls away, because

now there’s only one direction to travel: forward into the consequences of

your choice.

The Watermelon Problem

ne Friday in April 2016, as that year’s polarizing American

presidential race intensified, and more than thirty armed conflicts

raged around the globe, approximately three million people spent

part of their day watching two reporters from BuzzFeed wrap rubber bands

around a watermelon. Gradually, over the course of forty-three agonizing

minutes, the pressure ramped up—both the psychological kind and the

physical pressure on the watermelon—until, at minute forty-four, the 686th

rubber band was applied. What happened next won’t amaze you: the

watermelon exploded, messily. The reporters high-fived, wiped the splatters

from their reflective goggles, then ate some watermelon. The broadcast

ended. The earth continued its orbit around the sun.

I’m not raising this to imply that there’s anything especially shameful

about spending forty-four minutes of your day staring at a watermelon on

the internet. On the contrary, given what was to happen to life online in the

years after 2016—as the trolls and neo-Nazis began to crowd out the pop

quizzes and cat videos, and social media increasingly became a matter of

“doomscrolling” in a depressive daze through bottomless feeds of bad news

—the BuzzFeed watermelon escapade already feels like a tale from a

happier time. But it’s worth mentioning because it illustrates an elephant-in-

the-room problem with everything I’ve been arguing so far about time and

time management. That problem is distraction. After all, it hardly matters

how committed you are to making the best use of your limited time if, day

after day, your attention gets wrenched away by things on which you never

wanted to focus. It’s a safe bet that none of those three million people woke

up that morning with the intention of using a portion of their lives to watch

a watermelon burst; nor, when the moment arrived, did they necessarily feel

as though they were freely choosing to do so. “I want to stop watching so

bad but I’m already committed,” read one typically rueful comment on

Facebook. “I’ve been watching you guys put rubber bands around a

watermelon for 40 minutes,” wrote someone else. “What am I doing with

my life?”

The watermelon tale is a reminder, moreover, that these days distraction

has become all but synonymous with digital distraction: it’s what happens

when the internet gets in the way of our attempts to concentrate. But this is

misleading. Philosophers have been worrying about distraction at least

since the time of the ancient Greeks, who saw it less as a matter of external

interruptions and more as a question of character—a systematic inner

failure to use one’s time on what one claimed to value the most. Their

reason for treating distraction so seriously was straightforward, and it’s the

reason we ought to do so, too: what you pay attention to will define, for

you, what reality is.

Even commentators who spend a lot of time fretting about the modern-

day “crisis of distraction” rarely seem to grasp the full implications of this.

For example, you hear it said that attention is a “finite resource,” and finite

it certainly is: according to one calculation, by the psychologist Timothy

Wilson, we’re capable of consciously attending to about 0.0004 percent of

the information bombarding our brains at any given moment. But to

describe attention as a “resource” is to subtly misconstrue its centrality in

our lives. Most other resources on which we rely as individuals—such as

food, money, and electricity—are things that facilitate life, and in some

cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on

the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of

nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the

end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from

moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you

pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an

exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life. Seen this way,

“distraction” needn’t refer only to momentary lapses in focus, as when

you’re distracted from performing your work duties by the ping of an

incoming text message, or a compellingly terrible news story. The job itself

could be a distraction—that is, an investment of a portion of your attention,

and therefore of your life, in something less meaningful than other options

that might have been available to you.

This was why Seneca, in On the Shortness of Life, came down so hard

on his fellow Romans for pursuing political careers they didn’t really care

about, holding elaborate banquets they didn’t especially enjoy, or just

“baking their bodies in the sun”: they didn’t seem to realize that in

succumbing to such diversions, they were squandering the very stuff of

existence. Seneca risks sounding like an uptight pleasure-hater here—after

all, what’s so bad about a bit of sunbathing?—and to be honest, I suspect he

probably was. But the crucial point isn’t that it’s wrong to choose to spend

your time relaxing, whether at the beach or on BuzzFeed. It’s that the

distracted person isn’t really choosing at all. Their attention has been

commandeered by forces that don’t have their highest interests at heart.

The proper response to this situation, we’re often told today, is to render

ourselves indistractible in the face of interruptions: to learn the secrets of

“relentless focus”—usually involving meditation, web-blocking apps,

expensive noise-canceling headphones, and more meditation—so as to win

the attentional struggle once and for all. But this is a trap. When you aim for

this degree of control over your attention, you’re making the mistake of

addressing one truth about human limitation—your limited time, and the

consequent need to use it well—by denying another truth about human

limitation, which is that achieving total sovereignty over your attention is

almost certainly impossible. In any case, it would be highly undesirable to

be able to do exactly as you wished with your attention. If outside forces

couldn’t commandeer at least some of it against your will, you’d be unable

to step out of the path of oncoming buses, or hear that your baby was in

distress. Nor are the benefits confined to emergencies; the same

phenomenon is what allows your attention to be seized by a beautiful

sunset, or your eye to be caught by a stranger’s across a room. But it’s the

obvious survival advantages of this kind of distractibility that explain why

we evolved that way. The Paleolithic hunter-gatherer whose attention was

alerted by a rustling in the bushes, whether he liked it or not, would have

been far more likely to flourish than one who heard such rustlings only after

first making the conscious decision to listen out for them.

Neuroscientists call this “bottom-up” or involuntary attention, and we’d

struggle to stay alive without it. Yet the capacity to exert some influence

over the other part of your attention—the “top-down” or voluntary kind—

can make the whole difference between a well-lived life and a hellish one.

The classic and extreme demonstration of this is the case of the Austrian

psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, who

was able to fend off despair as a prisoner in Auschwitz because he retained

the ability to direct a portion of his attention toward the only domain the

camp guards couldn’t violate: his inner life, which he was then able to

conduct with a measure of autonomy, resisting the outer pressures that

threatened to reduce him to the status of an animal. But the flip side of this

inspiring truth is that a life spent in circumstances immeasurably better than

a concentration camp can still end up feeling fairly meaningless if you’re

incapable of directing some of your attention as you’d like. After all, to

have any meaningful experience, you must be able to focus on it, at least a

bit. Otherwise, are you really having it at all? Can you have an experience

you don’t experience? The finest meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant

might as well be a plate of instant noodles if your mind is elsewhere; and a

friendship to which you never actually give a moment’s thought is a

friendship in name only. “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” writes the

poet Mary Oliver, pointing to the fact that distraction and care are

incompatible with each other: you can’t truly love a partner or a child,

dedicate yourself to a career or to a cause—or just savor the pleasure of a

stroll in the park—except to the extent that you can hold your attention on

the object of your devotion to begin with.

A Machine for Misusing Your Life

All of which helps clarify what’s so alarming about the contemporary

online “attention economy,” of which we’ve heard so much in recent years:

it’s essentially a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong

choices about what to do with your attention, and therefore with your finite

life, by getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about. And

you have far too little control over your attention simply to decide, as if by

fiat, that you’re not going to succumb to its temptations.

Many of us are familiar by now with the basic contours of this situation.

We know that the “free” social media platforms we use aren’t really free,

because, as the saying goes, you’re not the customer but the product being

sold: in other words, the technology companies’ profits come from seizing

our attention, then selling it to advertisers. We’re at least dimly aware, too,

that our smartphones are tracking our every move, recording how we swipe

and click, what we linger on or scroll past, so that the data collected can be

used to show us precisely that content most likely to keep us hooked, which

usually means whatever makes us angriest or most horrified. All the feuds

and fake news and public shamings on social media, therefore, aren’t a

flaw, from the perspective of the platform owners; they’re an integral part

of the business model.

You might also be aware that all this is delivered by means of

“persuasive design”—an umbrella term for an armory of psychological

techniques borrowed directly from the designers of casino slot machines,

for the express purpose of encouraging compulsive behavior. One example

among hundreds is the ubiquitous drag-down-to-refresh gesture, which

keeps people scrolling by exploiting a phenomenon known as “variable

rewards”: when you can’t predict whether or not refreshing the screen will

bring new posts to read, the uncertainty makes you more likely to keep

trying, again and again and again, just as you would on a slot machine.

When this whole system reaches a certain level of pitiless efficiency, the

former Facebook investor turned detractor Roger McNamee has argued, the

old cliché about users as “the product being sold” stops seeming so apt.

After all, companies are generally motivated to treat even their products

with a modicum of respect, which is more than can be said about how some

of them treat their users. A better analogy, McNamee suggests, is that we’re

the fuel: logs thrown on Silicon Valley’s fire, impersonal repositories of

attention to be exploited without mercy, until we’re all used up.

What’s far less widely appreciated than all that, though, is how deep the

distraction goes, and how radically it undermines our efforts to spend our

finite time as we’d like. As you surface from an hour inadvertently frittered

away on Facebook, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the damage, in

terms of wasted time, was limited to that single misspent hour. But you’d be

wrong. Because the attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever’s

most compelling—instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful—it

systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all

times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we

face, how venal our political opponents are, and thousands of other things—

and all these distorted judgments then influence how we allocate our offline

time as well. If social media convinces you, for example, that violent crime

is a far bigger problem in your city than it really is, you might find yourself

walking the streets with unwarranted fear, staying home instead of

venturing out, and avoiding interactions with strangers—and voting for a

demagogue with a tough-on-crime platform. If all you ever see of your

ideological opponents online is their very worst behavior, you’re liable to

assume that even family members who differ from you politically must be

similarly, irredeemably bad, making relationships with them hard to

maintain. So it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more

important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining “important

matters” in the first place. In the words of the philosopher Harry Frankfurt,

they sabotage our capacity to “want what we want to want.”

My own squalid, but I suspect entirely typical, history as a Twitter

junkie might serve as a case in point. Even at the height of my dependency

(I’m now in recovery), I rarely spent more than two hours a day glued to the

screen. Yet Twitter’s dominion over my attention extended a great deal

further than that. Long after I’d closed the app, I’d be panting on the

treadmill at the gym, or chopping carrots for dinner, only to find myself

mentally prosecuting a devastating argument against some idiotic holder of

Wrong Opinions I’d had the misfortune to encounter online earlier that day.

(It wasn’t misfortune really, of course; the algorithm showed me those posts

deliberately, having learned what would wind me up.) Or my newborn son

would do something adorable, and I’d catch myself speculating about how I

might describe it in a tweet, as if what mattered wasn’t the experience but

my (unpaid!) role as a provider of content for Twitter. And I vividly recall

walking alone along a windswept Scottish beach, as dusk began to fall,

when I experienced one particularly disturbing side effect of “persuasive

design,” which is the twitchiness you start to feel when the activity in which

you’re engaged hasn’t been crafted by a team of professional psychologists

hell-bent on ensuring that your attention never wavers. I love windswept

Scottish beaches at dusk more passionately than anything I can ever

remember encountering on social media. But only the latter is engineered to

constantly adapt to my interests and push my psychological buttons, so as to

keep my attention captive. No wonder the rest of reality sometimes seems

unable to compete.

At the same time, the hopelessness of the world I encountered online

began to seep into the world of the concrete. It was impossible to drink

from Twitter’s fire hose of anger and suffering—of news and opinions

selected for my perusal precisely because they weren’t the norm, which was

what made them especially compelling—without starting to approach the

rest of life as if they were the norm, which meant being constantly braced

for confrontation or disaster, or harboring a nebulous sense of foreboding.

Unsurprisingly, this rarely proved to be the basis for a fulfilling day. To

make things more troublesome still, it can be difficult even to notice when

your outlook on life is being changed in this depressing fashion, thanks to a

special problem with attention, which is that it’s extremely difficult for it to

monitor itself. The only faculty you can use to see what’s happening to your

attention is your attention, the very thing that’s already been

commandeered. This means that once the attention economy has rendered

you sufficiently distracted, or annoyed, or on edge, it becomes easy to

assume that this is just what life these days inevitably feels like. In T. S.

Eliot’s words, we are “distracted from distraction by distraction.” The

unsettling possibility is that if you’re convinced that none of this is a

problem for you—that social media hasn’t turned you into an angrier, less

empathetic, more anxious, or more numbed-out version of yourself—that

might be because it has. Your finite time has been appropriated, without

your realizing anything’s amiss.

It’s been obvious for some time now, of course, that all this constitutes a

political emergency. By portraying our opponents as beyond persuasion,

social media sorts us into ever more hostile tribes, then rewards us, with

likes and shares, for the most hyperbolic denunciations of the other side,

fueling a vicious cycle that makes sane debate impossible. Meanwhile,

we’ve learned the hard way that unscrupulous politicians can overwhelm

their opposition, not to mention the fact-checking capabilities of journalists,

simply by flooding a nation’s attentional bandwidth with outrage after

outrage, so that each new scandal overwrites the last one in public

awareness—and anyone who responds or retweets, even if their intention is

to condemn the hatemongering, finds themselves rewarding it with

attention, thereby helping it spread.

As the technology critic Tristan Harris likes to say, each time you open

a social media app, there are “a thousand people on the other side of the

screen” paid to keep you there—and so it’s unrealistic to expect users to

resist the assault on their time and attention by means of willpower alone.

Political crises demand political solutions. Yet if we’re to understand

distraction at the deepest level, we’ll also have to acknowledge an awkward

truth at the bottom of all this, which is that “assault”—with its implications

of an uninvited attack—isn’t quite the right word. We mustn’t let Silicon

Valley off the hook, but we should be honest: much of the time, we give in

to distraction willingly. Something in us wants to be distracted, whether by

our digital devices or anything else—to not spend our lives on what we

thought we cared about the most. The calls are coming from inside the

house. This is among the most insidious of the obstacles we face in our

efforts to use our finite lives well, so it’s time to take a closer look at it.

The Intimate Interrupter

ad you been walking in the Kii Mountains in southern Japan

during the winter months of 1969, you might have witnessed

something startling: a pale and skinny American man, entirely

naked, dumping half-frozen water over his own head from a large wooden

cistern. His name was Steve Young, and he was training to become a monk

in the Shingon branch of Buddhism—but so far the process had been

nothing but a sequence of humiliations. First, the abbot of the Mount Koya

monastery had refused to let him in the door. Who on earth was this gangly

white Asian studies PhD student, who’d apparently decided the life of a

Japanese monk was for him? Eventually, after some badgering, Young had

been permitted to stay, but only in return for performing various menial

tasks around the monastery, like sweeping the hallways and washing dishes.

Now, at last, he had been authorized to begin the hundred-day solo retreat

that marked the first real step on the monastic journey—only to discover

that it entailed living in a tiny unheated hut and conducting a thrice-daily

purification ritual in which Young, who’d been raised beside the ocean in

balmy California, had to douse himself with several gallons of bone-chilling

melted snow. It was a “horrific ordeal,” he would recall years later. “It’s so

cold that the water freezes the moment it touches the floor, and your towel

freezes in your hand. So you’re sliding around barefoot on ice, trying to dry

your body with a frozen hand towel.”

Faced with physical distress—even of a much milder variety than this—

most people’s instinctive reaction is to try not to pay attention to it, to

attempt to focus on anything else at all. For example, if you’re mildly

phobic about hypodermic syringes, like I am, you’ve probably found

yourself staring very hard at the mediocre artwork in doctors’ clinics in an

effort to take your mind off the jab you’re about to receive. At first, this was

Young’s instinct, too: to recoil internally from the experience of the freezing

water hitting his skin by thinking about something different—or else just

trying, through an act of sheer will, not to feel the cold. This is hardly an

unreasonable reaction: when it’s so unpleasant to stay focused on present

experience, common sense would seem to suggest that mentally absenting

yourself from the situation would moderate the pain.

And yet as icy deluge followed icy deluge, Young began to understand

that this was precisely the wrong strategy. In fact, the more he concentrated

on the sensations of intense cold, giving his attention over to them as

completely as he could, the less agonizing he found them—whereas once

his “attention wandered, the suffering became unbearable.” After a few

days, he began preparing for each drenching by first becoming as focused

on his present experience as he possibly could so that, when the water hit,

he would avoid spiraling from mere discomfort into agony. Slowly it

dawned on him that this was the whole point of the ceremony. As he put it

—though traditional Buddhist monks certainly would not have done so—it

was a “giant biofeedback device,” designed to train him to concentrate by

rewarding him (with a reduction in suffering) for as long as he could remain

undistracted, and punishing him (with an increase in suffering) whenever he

failed. After his retreat, Young—who is now a meditation teacher better

known as Shinzen Young, his new first name having been bestowed on him

by the abbot at Mount Koya—found that his powers of concentration had

been transformed. Whereas staying focused on the present had made the

agonies of the ice-water ritual more tolerable, it made less unpleasant

undertakings—daily chores that might previously have been a source not of

agony but of boredom or annoyance—positively engrossing. The more

intensely he could hold his attention on the experience of whatever he was

doing, the clearer it became to him that the real problem had been not the

activity itself but his internal resistance to experiencing it. When he stopped

trying to block out those sensations and attended to them instead, the

discomfort would evaporate.

Young’s ordeal demonstrates an important point about what’s going on

when we succumb to distraction, which is that we’re motivated by the

desire to try to flee something painful about our experience of the present.

This is obvious enough when the pain in question is physical, like icy water

on naked skin and a flu jab at the doctor’s office—cases in which the

difficult sensations are so hard to ignore that it takes real effort to shift your

attention elsewhere. But it’s also true, in a subtler way, when it comes to

everyday distraction. Consider the archetypal case of being lured from your

work by social media: It’s not usually that you’re sitting there,

concentrating rapturously, when your attention is dragged away against

your will. In truth, you’re eager for the slightest excuse to turn away from

what you’re doing, in order to escape how disagreeable it feels to be doing

it; you slide away to the Twitter pile-on or the celebrity gossip site with a

feeling not of reluctance but of relief. We’re told that there’s a “war for our

attention,” with Silicon Valley as the invading force. But if that’s true, our

role on the battlefield is often that of collaborators with the enemy.

Mary Oliver calls this inner urge toward distraction “the intimate

interrupter”—that “self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the

door panels,” promising an easier life if only you’d redirect your attention

away from the meaningful but challenging task at hand, to whatever’s

unfolding one browser tab away. “One of the puzzling lessons I have

learned,” observes the author Gregg Krech, describing his own experience

of the same urge, “is that, more often than not, I do not feel like doing most

of the things that need doing. I’m not just speaking about cleaning the toilet

bowl or doing my tax returns. I’m referring to those things I genuinely

desire to accomplish.”

The Discomfort of What Matters

It’s worth pausing to notice how exceptionally strange this is. Why, exactly,

are we rendered so uncomfortable by concentrating on things that matter—

the things we thought we wanted to do with our lives—that we’d rather flee

into distractions, which, by definition, are what we don’t want to be doing

with our lives? Certain specific tasks might be so unpleasant or intimidating

that a preference for avoiding them wouldn’t be very remarkable. But the

more common issue is one of boredom, which often arises without

explanation. Suddenly, the thing you’d resolved to do, because it mattered

to you to do it, feels so staggeringly tedious that you can’t bear to focus on

it for one moment more.

The solution to this mystery, dramatic though it might sound, is that

whenever we succumb to distraction, we’re attempting to flee a painful

encounter with our finitude—with the human predicament of having limited

time, and more especially, in the case of distraction, limited control over

that time, which makes it impossible to feel certain about how things will

turn out. (Except, that is, for the deeply unpleasant certainty that one day

death will bring it all to an end.) When you try to focus on something you

deem important, you’re forced to face your limits, an experience that feels

especially uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one you

value so much. Unlike the architect from Shiraz, who refused to bring his

ideal mosque into the world of time and imperfection, you’re obliged to

give up your godlike fantasies and to experience your lack of power over

things you care about. Perhaps the cherished creative project will prove

beyond your talents, or maybe the difficult marital conversation for which

you’d been steeling yourself will unravel into a bitter argument. And even if

everything proceeds wonderfully, you couldn’t have known in advance that

it was going to do so, so you’ll still have had to give up the feeling of being

the master of your time. To quote the psychotherapist Bruce Tift once more,

you’ll have had to allow yourself to risk feeling “claustrophobic,

imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality.”

This is why boredom can feel so surprisingly, aggressively unpleasant:

we tend to think of it merely as a matter of not being particularly interested

in whatever it is we’re doing, but in fact it’s an intense reaction to the

deeply uncomfortable experience of confronting your limited control.

Boredom can strike in widely differing contexts—when you’re working on

a major project; when you can’t think of anything to do on a Sunday

afternoon; when it’s your job to care for a two-year-old for five hours

straight—but they all have one characteristic in common: they demand that

you face your finitude. You’re obliged to deal with how your experience is

unfolding in this moment, to resign yourself to the reality that this is it.

No wonder we seek out distractions online, where it feels as though no

limits apply—where you can update yourself instantaneously on events

taking place a continent away, present yourself however you like, and keep

scrolling forever through infinite newsfeeds, drifting through “a realm in

which space doesn’t matter and time spreads out into an endless present,” to

quote the critic James Duesterberg. It’s true that killing time on the internet

often doesn’t feel especially fun, these days. But it doesn’t need to feel fun.

In order to dull the pain of finitude, it just needs to make you feel

unconstrained.

This also makes it easier to see why the strategies generally

recommended for defeating distraction—digital detoxes, personal rules

about when you’ll allow yourself to check your inbox, and so forth—rarely

work, or at least not for long. They involve limiting your access to the

things you use to assuage your urge toward distraction, and in the case of

the most addictive forms of technology, that’s surely a sensible idea. But

they don’t address the urge itself. Even if you quit Facebook, or ban

yourself from social media during the workday, or exile yourself to a cabin

in the mountains, you’ll probably still find it unpleasantly constraining to

focus on what matters, so you’ll find some way to relieve the pain by

distracting yourself: by daydreaming, taking an unnecessary nap, or—the

preferred option of the productivity geek—redesigning your to-do list and

reorganizing your desk.

The overarching point is that what we think of as “distractions” aren’t

the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to

seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation. The reason it’s

hard to focus on a conversation with your spouse isn’t that you’re

surreptitiously checking your phone beneath the dinner table. On the

contrary, “surreptitiously checking your phone beneath the dinner table” is

what you do because it’s hard to focus on the conversation—because

listening takes effort and patience and a spirit of surrender, and because

what you hear might upset you, so checking your phone is naturally more

pleasant. Even if you place your phone out of reach, therefore, you

shouldn’t be surprised to find yourself seeking some other way to avoid

paying attention. In the case of conversation, this generally takes the form

of mentally rehearsing what you’re going to say next, as soon as the other

person has finished making sounds with their mouth.

I wish I could reveal, at this point, the secret for uprooting the urge

toward distraction—the way to have it not feel unpleasant to decide to hold

your attention, for a sustained time, on something you value, or that you

can’t easily choose not to do. But the truth is that I don’t think there is one.

The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop

expecting things to be otherwise—to accept that this unpleasantness is

simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds

of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited

control over how our lives unfold.

Yet there’s a sense in which accepting this lack of any solution is the

solution. Young’s discovery on the mountainside, after all, was that his

suffering subsided only when he resigned himself to the truth of his

situation: when he stopped fighting the facts and allowed himself to more

fully feel the icy water on his skin. The less attention he devoted to

objecting to what was happening to him, the more attention he could give to

what was actually happening. My powers of concentration might not come

close to Young’s, but I’ve found the same logic applies. The way to find

peaceful absorption in a difficult project, or a boring Sunday afternoon,

isn’t to chase feelings of peace or absorption, but to acknowledge the

inevitability of discomfort, and to turn more of your attention to the reality

of your situation than to railing against it.

Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be

boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are

going, because we wish they were going differently (“This shouldn’t be

happening!”), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process.

There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in grasping that there are

certain truths about being a limited human from which you’ll never be

liberated. You don’t get to dictate the course of events. And the paradoxical

reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so

constraining.

Part II

Beyond Control

We Never Really Have Time

he cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter is famous, among other

reasons, for coining “Hofstadter’s law,” which states that any task

you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect,

“even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” In other words, even

if you know that a given project is likely to overrun, and you adjust your

schedule accordingly, it’ll just overrun your new estimated finishing time,

too. It follows from this that the standard advice about planning—to give

yourself twice as long as you think you’ll need—could actually make

matters worse. You might be well aware of, say, your unrealistic tendency

to assume that you can complete the weekly grocery shopping in an hour,

door to door. But if you allow yourself two hours, precisely because you

know that you’re usually overoptimistic, you may find it taking two and a

half hours instead. (The effect becomes especially clear on a bigger scale:

the government of New South Wales, being acutely conscious that big

construction projects tend to overrun, allowed a seemingly ample four years

for the building of the Sydney Opera House—but it ended up taking

fourteen, at a cost of more than 1,400 percent of the original budget.)

Hofstadter was half joking, of course. But I’ve always found something a

little unsettling about his law, because if it’s true—and it certainly seems to

be, in my experience—it suggests something very strange: that the activities

we try to plan for somehow actively resist our efforts to make them

conform to our plans. It’s as if our efforts to be good planners don’t merely

fail but cause things to take longer still. Reality seems to fight back, an

angry god determined to remind us that it retains the upper hand, no matter

how much we try to supplicate to it by building extra slack into our

schedules.

To be fair, this sort of thing probably bothers me more than most,

because I come from a family of people you might reasonably call

obsessive planners. We’re the type who like to get our ducks in a row by

confirming, as far in advance as possible, how the future is going to unfold,

and who get antsy and anxious when obliged to coordinate with those who

prefer to take life as it comes. My wife and I are lucky to make it to the end

of June, in any given year, before receiving the first inquiry from my

parents about our plans for Christmas; and I was raised to regard anyone

who booked a flight or hotel room less than about four months before the

proposed date of departure or occupancy as living life on the edge to an

inexcusable degree. On family vacations, we could be guaranteed a three-

hour wait at the airport, or an hour at the railway station, having left home

much too far ahead of time. (“Dad Suggests Arriving at Airport 14 Hours

Early,” reads a headline in The Onion, apparently inspired by my

childhood.) All this annoyed me then, as it annoys me today, with that

special irritation reserved for traits one recognizes all too clearly in oneself

as well.

At least I think I can say that my family comes by it honestly. My

paternal grandmother, who was Jewish, was nine years old and living in

Berlin when Hitler came to power in 1933, and she was fifteen by the time

her stepfather, surveying the wreckage of Kristallnacht, finally made plans

to get his family to Hamburg and thence on board the SS Manhattan, bound

for Southampton in England. (The passengers, I was once told, popped

champagne corks on deck, but only after they were certain the ship had left

German waters.) Her own grandmother, my great-great-grandmother, never

made it out, and later died in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt. It’s

not especially hard to see how an adolescent German-Jewish girl, arriving

in London on the eve of the Second World War, might acquire, and later

pass on to her children, the unshakable belief that if you didn’t plan things

exactly right, some very bad fate might befall you or those you loved.

Sometimes, when you’re leaving on a trip, it really is important to get to

your point of departure in plenty of time.

The trouble with being so emotionally invested in planning for the

future, though, is that while it may occasionally prevent a catastrophe, the

rest of the time it tends to exacerbate the very anxiety it was supposed to

allay. The obsessive planner, essentially, is demanding certain reassurances

from the future—but the future isn’t the sort of thing that can ever provide

the reassurance he craves, for the obvious reason that it’s still in the future.

After all, you can never be absolutely certain that something won’t make

you late for the airport, no matter how many spare hours you build in. Or

rather you can be certain—but only once you’ve arrived and you’re cooling

your heels in the terminal, at which point there’s no solace to be gained

from the fact that everything turned out fine, because that’s all in the past

now, and there’s the next chunk of the future to feel anxious about instead.

(Will the plane land at its destination in time for you to catch your onward

train? And so on and so on.) Really, no matter how far ahead you plan, you

never get to relax in the certainty that everything’s going to go the way

you’d like. Instead, the frontier of your uncertainty just gets pushed further

and further toward the horizon. Once your Christmas plans are nailed down,

there’s January to think about, then February, then March…

I’m using my neurotic family by way of example here, but it’s important

to see that this underlying longing to turn the future into something

dependable isn’t confined to compulsive planners. It’s present in anyone

who worries about anything, whether or not they respond by devising

elaborate timetables or hypercautious travel plans. Worry, at its core, is the

repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security

about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again—as if the

very effort of worrying might somehow help forestall disaster. The fuel

behind worry, in other words, is the internal demand to know, in advance,

that things will turn out fine: that your partner won’t leave you, that you will

have sufficient money to retire, that a pandemic won’t claim the lives of

anyone you love, that your favored candidate will win the next election, that

you can get through your to-do list by the end of Friday afternoon. But the

struggle for control over the future is a stark example of our refusal to

acknowledge our built-in limitations when it comes to time, because it’s a

fight the worrier obviously won’t win. You can never be truly certain about

the future. And so your reach will always exceed your grasp.

Anything Could Happen

In much of this book so far, I’ve emphasized the importance of confronting,

rather than avoiding, the uncomfortable reality about how little time we

have. But it should also be becoming clear that there’s something suspect

about the idea of time as a thing we “have” in the first place. As the writer

David Cain points out, we never have time in the same sense that we have

the cash in our wallets or the shoes on our feet. When we claim that we

have time, what we really mean is that we expect it. “We assume we have

three hours or three days to do something,” Cain writes, “but it never

actually comes into our possession.” Any number of factors could confound

your expectations, robbing you of the three hours you thought you “had” in

which to complete an important work project: your boss could interrupt

with an urgent request; the subway could break down; you could die. And

even if you do end up getting the full three hours, precisely in line with

your expectations, you won’t know this for sure until the point at which

those hours have passed into history. You only ever get to feel certain about

the future once it’s already turned into the past.

Likewise, and despite everything I’ve been saying, nobody ever really

gets four thousand weeks in which to live—not only because you might end

up with fewer than that, but because in reality you never even get a single

week, in the sense of being able to guarantee that it will arrive, or that

you’ll be in a position to use it precisely as you wish. Instead, you just find

yourself in each moment as it comes, already thrown into this time and

place, with all the limitations that entails, and unable to feel certain about

what might happen next. Reflect on this a little, and Heidegger’s idea that

we are time—that there’s no meaningful way to think of a person’s

existence except as a sequence of moments of time—begins to make more

sense. And it has real psychological consequences, because the assumption

that time is something we can possess or control is the unspoken premise of

almost all our thinking about the future, our planning and goalsetting and

worrying. So it’s a constant source of anxiety and agitation, because our

expectations are forever running up against the stubborn reality that time

isn’t in our possession and can’t be brought under our control.

My point, to be clear, isn’t that it’s a bad idea to make plans, or save

money for retirement, or remember to vote, so as to increase the chances

that the future will turn out the way you’d like. Our efforts to influence the

future aren’t the problem. The problem—the source of all the anxiety—is

the need that we feel, from our vantage point here in the present moment, to

be able to know that those efforts will prove successful. It’s fine, of course,

to strongly prefer that your partner never leave you, and to treat him or her

in ways that make that happy outcome more likely. But it’s a recipe for a

life of unending stress to insist that you must be able to feel certain, now,

that this is how your relationship is definitely going to unfold in the future.

So a surprisingly effective antidote to anxiety can be to simply realize that

this demand for reassurance from the future is one that will definitely never

be satisfied—no matter how much you plan or fret, or how much extra time

you leave to get to the airport. You can’t know that things will turn out all

right. The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one—which

means you have permission to stop engaging in it. The future just isn’t the

sort of thing you get to order around like that, as the French mathematician

and philosopher Blaise Pascal understood: “So imprudent are we,” he

wrote, “that we wander in the times which are not ours…We try to [give the

present the support of] the future, and think of arranging matters which are

not in our power, for a time which we have no certainty of reaching.”

Our anxiety about the uncontrollability of the future begins to seem

rather more absurd, and perhaps therefore a little easier to let go of, when

considered in the context of the past. We go through our days fretting

because we can’t control what the future holds; and yet most of us would

probably concede that we got to wherever we are in our lives without

exerting much control over it at all. Whatever you value most about your

life can always be traced back to some jumble of chance occurrences you

couldn’t possibly have planned for, and that you certainly can’t alter

retrospectively now. You might never have been invited to the party where

you met your future spouse. Your parents might never have moved to the

neighborhood near the school with the inspiring teacher who perceived your

undeveloped talents and helped you shine. And so on—and if you peer back

even further in time, to before your own birth, it’s an even more dizzying

matter of coincidence piled upon coincidence. In her autobiography All Said

and Done, Simone de Beauvoir marvels at the mind-boggling number of

things, all utterly beyond her control, that had to happen in order to make

her her:

If I go to sleep after lunch in the room where I work, sometimes I wake up with a feeling of

childish amazement—why am I myself? What astonishes me, just as it astonishes a child

when he becomes aware of his own identity, is the fact of finding myself here, and at this

moment, deep in this life and not in any other. What stroke of chance has brought this

about?…The penetration of that particular ovum by that particular spermatozoon, with its

implications of the meeting of my parents and before that of their birth and the birth of all

their forebears, had not one chance in hundreds of millions of coming about. And it is chance,

a chance quite unpredictable in the present state of science, that caused me to be born a

woman. From that point on, it seems to me that a thousand different futures might have

stemmed from every single movement of my past: I might have fallen ill and broken off my

studies; I might not have met Sartre; anything at all might have happened.

There’s a soothing implication in de Beauvoir’s words: that despite our

total lack of control over any of these occurrences, each of us made it

through to this point in our lives—so it might at least be worth entertaining

the possibility that when the uncontrollable future arrives, we’ll have what

it takes to weather that as well. And that you shouldn’t necessarily even

want such control, given how much of what you value in life only ever

came to pass thanks to circumstances you never chose.

Minding Your Own Business

These truths about the uncontrollability of the past and the unknowability of

the future explain why so many spiritual traditions seem to converge on the

same advice: that we should aspire to confine our attentions to the only

portion of time that really is any of our business—this one, here in the

present. “Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master

carpenter’s place,” cautions one of the founding texts of Taoism, the Tao Te

Ching, in a warning echoed several centuries later by the Buddhist scholar

Geshe Shawopa, who gruffly commanded his students, “Do not rule over

imaginary kingdoms of endlessly proliferating possibilities.” Jesus says

much the same thing in the Sermon on the Mount (though many of his later

followers would interpret the Christian idea of eternal life as a reason to

fixate on the future, not to ignore it). “Take no thought for the morrow, for

the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself,” he advises. Then he

adds the celebrated phrase “sufficient to the day is the evil thereof,” a line

I’ve only ever been able to hear in a tone of wry amusement directed at his

listeners: Do you first-century working-class Galileans really lead such

problem-free lives, he seems to be teasing them, that it makes sense to

invent additional problems by fretting about what might happen tomorrow?

But the version of this thought that has always resonated the most for

me comes from the modern-day spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, who

expressed it, in a characteristically direct manner, in a lecture delivered in

California in the late 1970s. “Partway through this particular talk,” recalls

the writer Jim Dreaver, who was in attendance, “Krishnamurti suddenly

paused, leaned forward, and said, almost conspiratorially, ‘Do you want to

know what my secret is?’ Almost as though we were one body, we sat up…

I could see people all around me lean forward, their ears straining, their

mouths slowly opening in hushed anticipation.” Then Krishnamurti “said in

a soft, almost shy voice, ‘You see, I don’t mind what happens.’ ”

I don’t mind what happens. Perhaps these words need a little unpacking;

I don’t think Krishnamurti means to say that we shouldn’t feel sorrow,

compassion, or anger when bad things happen to ourselves or others, nor

that we should give up on our efforts to prevent bad things from happening

in the future. Rather, a life spent “not minding what happens” is one lived

without the inner demand to know that the future will conform to your

desires for it—and thus without having to be constantly on edge as you wait

to discover whether or not things will unfold as expected. None of that

means we can’t act wisely in the present to reduce the chances of bad

developments later on. And we can still respond, to the best of our abilities,

should bad things nonetheless occur; we’re not obliged to accept suffering

or injustice as part of the inevitable order of things. But to the extent that

we can stop demanding certainty that things will go our way later on, we’ll

be liberated from anxiety in the only moment it ever actually is, which is

this one.

Incidentally, I also don’t take Krishnamurti to be recommending that we

emulate those irritating individuals (we all know one or two of them) who

are a little too proud of their commitment to being spontaneous—who insist

on their right to never make plans and to skip impulsively through life, and

of whom you can never be sure that an agreement to meet at six o’clock for

a drink means they have the slightest intention of showing up. These

ostentatiously free-and-easy types seem to feel confined by the very act of

making plans, or trying to stick to them. But planning is an essential tool for

constructing a meaningful life, and for exercising our responsibilities

toward other people. The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our

plans to be something they aren’t. What we forget, or can’t bear to confront,

is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein,

“a plan is just a thought.” We treat our plans as though they are a lasso,

thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our

command. But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-

moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts

about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the

future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.

You Are Here

here’s another sense in which treating time as something that we

own and get to control seems to make life worse. Inevitably, we

become obsessed with “using it well,” whereupon we discover an

unfortunate truth: the more you focus on using time well, the more each day

begins to feel like something you have to get through, en route to some

calmer, better, more fulfilling point in the future, which never actually

arrives. The problem is one of instrumentalization. To use time, by

definition, is to treat it instrumentally, as a means to an end, and of course

we do this every day: you don’t boil the kettle out of a love of boiling

kettles, or put your socks in the washing machine out of a love for operating

washing machines, but because you want a cup of coffee or clean socks. Yet

it turns out to be perilously easy to overinvest in this instrumental

relationship to time—to focus exclusively on where you’re headed, at the

expense of focusing on where you are—with the result that you find

yourself living mentally in the future, locating the “real” value of your life

at some time that you haven’t yet reached, and never will.

In his book Back to Sanity, the psychologist Steve Taylor recalls

watching tourists at the British Museum in London who weren’t really

looking at the Rosetta Stone, the ancient Egyptian artifact on display in

front of them, so much as preparing to look at it later, by recording images

and videos of it on their phones. So intently were they focused on using

their time for a future benefit—for the ability to revisit or share the

experience later on—that they were barely experiencing the exhibition itself

at all. (And who ever watches most of those videos anyway?) Of course,

grumbling about younger people’s smartphone habits is a favorite pastime

of middle-aged curmudgeons like Taylor and me. But his deeper point is

that we’re all frequently guilty of something similar. We treat everything

we’re doing—life itself, in other words—as valuable only insofar as it lays

the groundwork for something else.

This future-focused attitude often takes the form of what I once heard

described as the “ ‘when-I-finally’ mind,” as in: “When I finally get my

workload under control/get my candidate elected/find the right romantic

partner/sort out my psychological issues, then I can relax, and the life I was

always meant to be living can begin.” The person mired in this mentality

believes that the reason she doesn’t feel fulfilled and happy is that she

hasn’t yet managed to accomplish certain specific things; when she does so,

she imagines, she’ll feel in charge of her life and be the master of her time.

Yet in fact the way she’s attempting to achieve that sense of security means

she’ll never feel fulfilled, because she’s treating the present solely as a path

to some superior future state—and so the present moment won’t ever feel

satisfying in itself. Even if she does get her workload under control, or meet

her soulmate, she’ll just find some other reason to postpone her fulfillment

until later on.

Certainly, context matters; there are plenty of situations in which it’s

understandable that people focus intently on the possibility of a better

future. Nobody faults the low-paid cleaner of public restrooms for looking

forward to the end of the day, or to a time in the future when he has a better

job; in the meantime, he naturally treats his working hours mainly as a

means to the end of receiving a paycheck. But there’s something odder

about the ambitious and well-paid architect, employed in the profession she

always longed to join, who nonetheless finds herself treating every moment

of her experience as worthwhile only in terms of bringing her closer to the

completion of a project, so that she can move on to the next one, or move

up the ranks, or move toward retirement. To live like this is arguably insane

—but it’s an insanity that gets inculcated in us early in life, as the self-

styled “spiritual entertainer” and New Age philosopher Alan Watts

explained with characteristic vigor:

Take education. What a hoax. As a child, you are sent to nursery school. In nursery school,

they say you are getting ready to go on to kindergarten. And then first grade is coming up and

second grade and third grade…In high school, they tell you you’re getting ready for college.

And in college you’re getting ready to go out into the business world…[People are] like

donkeys running after carrots that are hanging in front of their faces from sticks attached to

their own collars. They are never here. They never get there. They are never alive.

The Causal Catastrophe

It took becoming a father for me to grasp how completely I’d spent my

whole adult life, up to that point, mired in this future-chasing mindset. Not

that the epiphany was instantaneous. Indeed, what happened first, as my

son’s birth approached, was that I became more obsessed than usual with

using time well. Presumably every new parent, arriving home from the

hospital to face the reality of their incompetence in the matter of child-

rearing, feels some desire to spend their time as wisely as possible—first to

keep the squirming bundle alive, and then to do whatever they can to lay the

foundations for a happy future. But at the time, I was still enough of a

productivity geek that I compounded my problems by purchasing several

how-to books aimed at the parents of newborns; I was determined to make

the very best use of those first crucial months.

This genre of publishing, I soon realized, was sharply divided into two

camps, each in a permanent state of indignation at the mere existence of the

other. On the one side were the gurus I came to think of as the Baby

Trainers, who urged us to get our infant onto a strict schedule as soon as

possible—because the absence of such structure would leave him

existentially insecure and also because making his days more predictable

would mean he could be seamlessly integrated into the rhythms of the

household. This would allow everyone to get some sleep, and my wife and

me to swiftly return to work. On the other side were the Natural Parents, for

whom all such schedules—and frankly, the very notion of mothers having

jobs to return to—were further evidence that modernity had corrupted the

purity of parenthood, which could be recovered only by emulating the

earthy practices of indigenous tribes in the developing world and/or

prehistoric humans, these two groups being, to this camp of parenting

experts, for all practical purposes, the same.

Later, I would learn that there’s virtually no credible scientific evidence

favoring either of these camps. (For example: the “proof” that it’s wrong to

let your baby cry itself to sleep comes largely from research among infants

abandoned in Romanian orphanages, which is hardly the same as leaving

your child alone in their cozy Scandinavian bassinet for twenty minutes a

day; meanwhile, there’s one West African ethnic group, the Hausa-Fulani,

who violate every Western parenting philosophy by deeming it taboo in

some cases for mothers to make eye contact with their babies—and it seems

those kids mostly turn out fine, too.) But what struck me most forcefully

was how entirely preoccupied with the future both sets of experts were—

indeed, how virtually all the parenting advice I encountered, in books and

online, seemed utterly focused on doing whatever was required to produce

the happiest or most successful or economically productive older children

and adults later on.

This was obvious enough in the case of the Baby Trainers, with their

passion for inculcating good habits that might serve a baby well for life. But

it was no less true of the Natural Parents. It would have been one thing if

the Natural Parents’ justifications for insisting on “baby-wearing,” or co-

sleeping, or breastfeeding until age three had simply been that these were

more satisfying ways for parents and babies to live. But their real motive,

sometimes explicitly expressed, was that these were the best things to do to

ensure a child’s future psychological health. (Again: no real evidence.) And

it struck me, rather more uncomfortably, that the reason I’d been seeking all

this advice in the first place was because this was my stance on life, too:

that for as long as I could remember, my days had been spent striving for

future outcomes—exam results, jobs, better exercise habits: the list went on

and on—in the service of some notional time when life would run smoothly

at last. Now that my daily duties involved a baby, I’d simply expanded my

instrumental approach to accommodate the new reality: I wanted to know

that I was doing whatever was required to obtain optimal future results in

the domain of child-rearing as well.

Except that this now began to seem to me like an astoundingly perverse

way to approach spending time with a newborn, not to mention an

unnecessarily exhausting thing to have to think about when life was already

exhausting enough. Obviously, it mattered to keep half an eye on the future

—there would be vaccinations to be administered, preschools to apply to,

and so forth. But my son was here now, and he would be zero years old for

only one year, and I came to realize that I didn’t want to squander these

days of his actual existence by focusing solely on how best to use them for

the sake of his future one. He was sheer presence, participating

unconditionally in the moment in which he found himself, and I wanted to

join him in it. I wanted to watch his minuscule fist close around my finger,

and his wobbly head turn in response to a noise, without obsessing over

whether this showed he was meeting his “developmental milestones” or not,

or what I ought to be doing to ensure that he did. Worse still, it dawned on

me that my fixation on using time well meant using my son himself, a

whole other human being, as a tool for assuaging my own anxiety—treating

him as nothing but a means to my hypothetical future sense of security and

peace of mind.

The writer Adam Gopnik calls the trap into which I had fallen the

“causal catastrophe,” which he defines as the belief “that the proof of the

rightness or wrongness of some way of bringing up children is the kind of

adults it produces.” That idea sounds reasonable enough—how else would

you judge rightness or wrongness?—until you realize that its effect is to sap

childhood of any intrinsic value, by treating it as nothing but a training

ground for adulthood. Maybe it really is a “bad habit,” as the Baby Trainers

insist, for your one-year-old to grow accustomed to falling asleep on your

chest. But it’s also a delightful experience in the present moment, and that

has to be weighed in the balance; it can’t be the case that concerns for the

future must always automatically take precedence. Likewise, the question

of whether or not it’s okay to let your nine-year-old spend hours each day

playing violent video games doesn’t turn solely on whether or not it’ll turn

him into a violent adult, but also on whether that’s a good way for him to be

using his life right now; perhaps a childhood immersed in digital blood and

gore is just a lower-quality childhood, even if there aren’t any future effects.

In his play The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard puts an intensified version

of this sentiment into the mouth of the nineteenth-century Russian

philosopher Alexander Herzen, as he struggles to come to terms with the

death of his son, who has drowned in a shipwreck—and whose life, Herzen

insists, was no less valuable for never coming to fruition in adult

accomplishments. “Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is

to grow up,” Herzen says. “But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature

doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into

each moment…Life’s bounty is in its flow. Later is too late.”

The Last Time

And yet I hope it’s clear by now that none of this applies only to people

who happen to be the parents of small children. Certainly, it’s true that a

fast-developing newborn baby makes it especially hard to ignore the fact

that life is a succession of transient experiences, valuable in themselves,

which you’ll miss if you’re completely focused on the destination to which

you hope they might be leading. But the author and podcast host Sam

Harris makes the disturbing observation that the same applies to everything:

our lives, thanks to their finitude, are inevitably full of activities that we’re

doing for the very last time. Just as there will be a final occasion on which I

pick up my son—a thought that appalls me, but one that’s hard to deny,

since I surely won’t be doing it when he’s thirty—there will be a last time

that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the ocean, or make love, or

have a deep conversation with a certain close friend. Yet usually there’ll be

no way to know, in the moment itself, that you’re doing it for the last time.

Harris’s point is that we should therefore try to treat every such experience

with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it. And indeed

there’s a sense in which every moment of life is a “last time.” It arrives;

you’ll never get it again—and once it’s passed, your remaining supply of

moments will be one smaller than before. To treat all these moments solely

as stepping-stones to some future moment is to demonstrate a level of

obliviousness to our real situation that would be jaw-dropping if it weren’t

for the fact that we all do it, all the time.

Admittedly, it’s not entirely our own fault that we approach our finite

time in such a perversely instrumental and future-focused way. Powerful

external pressures push us in this direction, too, because we exist inside an

economic system that is instrumentalist to its core. One way of

understanding capitalism, in fact, is as a giant machine for

instrumentalizing everything it encounters—the earth’s resources, your time

and abilities (or “human resources”)—in the service of future profit. Seeing

things this way helps explain the otherwise mysterious truth that rich people

in capitalist economies are often surprisingly miserable. They’re very good

at instrumentalizing their time, for the purpose of generating wealth for

themselves; that’s the definition of being successful in a capitalist world.

But in focusing so hard on instrumentalizing their time, they end up treating

their lives in the present moment as nothing but a vehicle in which to travel

toward a future state of happiness. And so their days are sapped of meaning,

even as their bank balances increase.

This is also the kernel of truth in the cliché that people in less

economically successful countries are better at enjoying life—which is

another way of saying that they’re less fixated on instrumentalizing it for

future profit, and are thus more able to participate in the pleasures of the

present. Mexico, for example, has often outranked the United States in

global indices of happiness. Hence the old parable about a vacationing New

York businessman who gets talking to a Mexican fisherman, who tells him

that he works only a few hours per day and spends most of his time

drinking wine in the sun and playing music with his friends. Appalled at the

fisherman’s approach to time management, the businessman offers him an

unsolicited piece of advice: if the fisherman worked harder, he explains, he

could invest the profits in a bigger fleet of boats, pay others to do the

fishing, make millions, then retire early. “And what would I do then?” the

fisherman asks. “Ah, well, then,” the businessman replies, “you could spend

your days drinking wine in the sun and playing music with your friends.”

One vivid example of how the capitalist pressure toward

instrumentalizing your time saps meaning from life is the notorious case of

corporate lawyers. The Catholic legal scholar Cathleen Kaveny has argued

that the reason so many of them are so unhappy—despite being generally

very well paid—is the convention of the “billable hour,” which obliges

them to treat their time, and thus really themselves, as a commodity to be

sold off in sixty-minute chunks to clients. An hour not sold is automatically

an hour wasted. So when an outwardly successful, hard-charging attorney

fails to show up for a family dinner, or his child’s school play, it’s not

necessarily because he’s “too busy,” in the straightforward sense of having

too much to do. It may also be because he’s no longer able to conceive of an

activity that can’t be commodified as something worth doing at all. As

Kaveny writes, “Lawyers imbued with the ethos of the billable hour have

difficulty grasping a non-commodified understanding of the meaning of

time that would allow them to appreciate the true value of such

participation.” When an activity can’t be added to the running tally of

billable hours, it begins to feel like an indulgence one can’t afford. There

may be more of this ethos in most of us—even the nonlawyers—than we’d

care to admit.

And yet we’d be fooling ourselves to put all the blame on capitalism for

the way in which modern life so often feels like a slog, to be “gotten

through” en route to some better time in the future. The truth is that we

collaborate with this state of affairs. We choose to treat time in this self-

defeatingly instrumental way, and we do so because it helps us maintain the

feeling of being in omnipotent control of our lives. As long as you believe

that the real meaning of life lies somewhere off in the future—that one day

all your efforts will pay off in a golden era of happiness, free of all

problems—you get to avoid facing the unpalatable reality that your life isn’t

leading toward some moment of truth that hasn’t yet arrived. Our obsession

with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the

reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now—that life is nothing

but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll

probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect

working order. And that therefore you had better stop postponing the “real

meaning” of your existence into the future, and throw yourself into life

now.

John Maynard Keynes saw the truth at the bottom of all this, which is

that our fixation on what he called “purposiveness”—on using time well for

future purposes, or on “personal productivity,” he might have said, had he

been writing today—is ultimately motivated by the desire not to die. “The

‘purposive’ man,” Keynes wrote, “is always trying to secure a spurious and

delusive immortality for his actions by pushing his interests in them

forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor in truth

the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward forever to the

end of cat-dom. For him, jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow

and never jam today. Thus by pushing his jam always forward into the

future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality.” Because

he never has to “cash out” the meaningfulness of his actions in the here and

now, the purposive man gets to imagine himself an omnipotent god, whose

influence over reality extends infinitely off into the future; he gets to feel as

though he’s truly the master of his time. But the price he pays is a steep one.

He never gets to love an actual cat, in the present moment. Nor does he ever

get to enjoy any actual jam. By trying too hard to make the most of his

time, he misses his life.

Absent in the Present

Attempting to “live in the moment,” to find meaning in life now, brings its

own challenges too, though. Have you ever actually tried it? Despite the

insistence of modern mindfulness teachers that it’s a speedy path to

happiness—and despite a growing body of psychological research on the

benefits of “savoring,” or making the deliberate effort to appreciate life’s

smaller pleasures—it turns out to be bewilderingly difficult to do. In his

hippie classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig

describes arriving with his young son beside the blazing blue expanse of

Crater Lake in Oregon, a collapsed prehistoric volcano that is America’s

deepest body of water. He’s determined to get the most out of the

experience, yet somehow he fails: “[We] see the Crater Lake with a feeling

of ‘Well, there it is,’ just as the pictures show. I watch the other tourists, all

of whom seem to have out-of-place looks too. I have no resentment at this,

just a feeling that it’s all unreal and that the quality of the lake is smothered

by the fact that it’s so pointed to.” The more you try to be here now, to point

at what’s happening in this moment and really see it, the more it seems like

you aren’t here now—or alternatively that you are, but that the experience

has been drained of all its flavor.

I know how Pirsig must have felt. Several years ago, I visited

Tuktoyaktuk, a small town in the extreme north of Canada’s Northwest

Territories. At the time, it was accessible only by air or sea or, in winter, by

the route I took, which involved traveling in an off-road vehicle along the

surface of a frozen river, past ships immobilized in ice for the season, and

then driving upon the frozen Arctic Ocean itself. My journalistic

assignment concerned the fight between Canada and Russia for oil

resources beneath the North Pole—but naturally, having heard so much

about them, I also wanted to see the northern lights. Several nights running,

I forced myself outside into minus-thirty-degree-Celsius cold—a

temperature at which the moisture inside your nose turns to ice the moment

you inhale—to find only the darkness of thick cloud cover. It wasn’t until

my last night there, shortly after two o’clock in the morning, that the couple

renting the neighboring cabin at my bed-and-breakfast tapped excitedly on

my door to tell me the time had come: the northern lights were on display. I

threw some clothes over my full-body thermal underwear and stepped out

under a cathedral sky, filled with moving curtains of green light, sweeping

from horizon to horizon. I was determined to relish the exhibition, which

the next morning locals would describe as a particularly impressive one.

But the more I tried, the less I seemed able to do so. By the time I was

getting ready to return to the warmth of my cabin, I was so far from being

absorbed in the moment that a thought occurred to me, regarding the

northern lights, which to this day I squirm to recall. Oh, I found myself

thinking, they look like one of those screen savers.

The problem is that the effort to be present in the moment, though it

seems like the exact opposite of the instrumentalist, future-focused mindset

I’ve been criticizing in this chapter, is in fact just a slightly different version

of it. You’re so fixated on trying to make the best use of your time—in this

case not for some later outcome, but for an enriching experience of life

right now—that it obscures the experience itself. It’s like trying too hard to

fall asleep, and therefore failing. You resolve to stay completely present

while, say, washing the dishes—perhaps because you saw that quotation

from the bestselling Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh about finding

absorption in the most mundane of activities—only to discover that you

can’t, because you’re too busy self-consciously wondering whether you’re

being present enough or not. The phrase “be here now” calls to mind

images of bearded stoners in bell-bottomed pants, utterly relaxed about

whatever’s happening around them. Yet in fact the attempt to be here now

feels not so much relaxing as rather strenuous—and it turns out that trying

to have the most intense possible present-moment experience is a surefire

way to fail. My favorite example of this effect is the 2015 study by

researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, in which couples

were instructed to have sex twice as frequently as usual for a two-month

period. At the end of this time, the study concluded, they weren’t any

happier than they had been at the start. This finding was widely reported as

demonstrating that a more active sex life isn’t as enjoyable as you might

have imagined. But what it really shows, I’d say, is that trying too hard to

have a more active sex life is no fun at all.

A more fruitful approach to the challenge of living more fully in the

moment starts from noticing that you are, in fact, always already living in

the moment anyway, whether you like it or not. After all, your self-

conscious thoughts about whether you’re sufficiently focused on washing

the dishes—or whether you’re enjoying the extra sex you’re having these

days, since agreeing to participate in that psychology study—are thoughts

arising in the present moment, too. And if you’re inescapably already in the

moment, there’s surely something deeply dubious about trying to bring that

state of affairs about. To try to live in the moment implies that you’re

somehow separate from “the moment,” and thus in a position to either

succeed or fail at living in it. For all its chilled-out associations, the attempt

to be here now is therefore still another instrumentalist attempt to use the

present moment purely as a means to an end, in an effort to feel in control

of your unfolding time. As usual, it doesn’t work. The self-consciousness

you experience when you seek too effortfully to be “more in the moment” is

the mental discomfort of attempting to lift yourself up by your own

bootstraps—to modify your relationship to the present moment in time,

when in fact that moment in time is all that you are to begin with.

As the author Jay Jennifer Matthews puts it in her excellently titled

short book Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are,

“We cannot get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could

take this thing to. There is no little pocket, situated outside of life, [to which

we could] steal life’s provisions and squirrel them away. The life of this

moment has no outside.” Living more fully in the present may be simply a

matter of finally realizing that you never had any other option but to be here

now.

Rediscovering Rest

ne boiling summer weekend a few years ago, I joined the

impassioned members of a campaigning group called Take Back

Your Time in an airless university lecture theater in Seattle, where

they’d assembled to further their long-standing mission of “eliminating the

epidemic of overwork.” The gathering in which I participated, their annual

conference, was a sparsely attended affair—in part because, as the

organizers conceded, it was August, and lots of people were on vacation,

and America’s most stridently pro-relaxation organization could hardly

complain about that. But it was also because Take Back Your Time

promotes what counts, these days, as a highly subversive message. There’s

nothing unusual about its demands for more days off or shorter working

hours; such proposals are increasingly common. But they are almost always

justified on the grounds that a well-rested worker is a more productive

worker—and it was precisely this rationale that the group had been set up to

question. Why, its members wanted to know, should vacations by the ocean,

or meals with friends, or lazy mornings in bed need defending in terms of

improved performance at work? “You keep hearing people arguing that

more time off might be good for the economy,” fumed John de Graaf, an

ebullient seventyish filmmaker and the driving force behind Take Back

Your Time. “But why should we have to justify life in terms of the

economy? It makes no sense!” Later, I learned about the existence of a rival

initiative, Project: Time Off, which, unlike Take Back Your Time, enjoyed

generous corporate sponsorship, and better-attended conferences—and it

was no surprise to learn that its mission was to promote “the personal,

business, social and economic benefits” of leisure. It was also backed by the

US Travel Association, which has its own reasons for wanting people to

take more vacations.

The Decline of Pleasure

De Graaf had put his finger on one of the sneakier problems with treating

time solely as something to be used as well as possible, which is that we

start to experience pressure to use our leisure time productively, too.

Enjoying leisure for its own sake—which you might have assumed was the

whole point of leisure—comes to feel as though it’s somehow not quite

enough. It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct

way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future.

Sometimes this pressure takes the form of the explicit argument that you

ought to think of your leisure hours as an opportunity to become a better

worker (“Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,” reads the headline on one

hugely popular New York Times piece). But a more surreptitious form of the

same attitude has also infected your friend who always seems to be training

for a 10K, yet who’s apparently incapable of just going for a run: she has

convinced herself that running is a meaningful thing to do only insofar as it

might lead toward a future accomplishment. And it infected me, too, during

the years I spent attending meditation classes and retreats with the barely

conscious goal that I might one day reach a condition of permanent calm.

Even an undertaking as seemingly hedonistic as a year spent backpacking

around the globe could fall victim to the same problem, if your purpose

isn’t to explore the world but—a subtle distinction, this—to add to your

mental storehouse of experiences, in the hope that you’ll feel, later on, that

you’d used your life well.

The regrettable consequence of justifying leisure only in terms of its

usefulness for other things is that it begins to feel vaguely like a chore—in

other words, like work in the worst sense of that word. This was a pitfall the

critic Walter Kerr noticed back in 1962, in his book The Decline of

Pleasure: “We are all of us compelled,” Kerr wrote, “to read for profit,

party for contacts…gamble for charity, go out in the evening for the greater

glory of the municipality, and stay home for the weekend to rebuild the

house.” Defenders of modern capitalism enjoy pointing out that despite how

things might feel, we actually have more leisure time than we did in

previous decades—an average of about five hours per day for men, and

only slightly less for women. But perhaps one reason we don’t experience

life that way is that leisure no longer feels very leisurely. Instead, it too

often feels like another item on the to-do list. And like many of our time

troubles, research suggests that this problem grows worse the wealthier you

get. Rich people are frequently busy working, but they also have more

options for how to use any given hour of free time: like anyone else, they

could read a novel or take a walk; but they could equally be attending the

opera, or planning a ski trip to Courchevel. So they’re more prone to feeling

that there are leisure activities they ought to be getting around to but aren’t.

We probably can’t hope to grasp how utterly alien this attitude toward

leisure would have seemed to anyone living at any point before the

Industrial Revolution. To the philosophers of the ancient world, leisure

wasn’t the means to some other end; on the contrary, it was the end to

which everything else worth doing was a means. Aristotle argued that true

leisure—by which he meant self-reflection and philosophical contemplation

—was among the very highest of virtues because it was worth choosing for

its own sake, whereas other virtues, like courage in war, or noble behavior

in government, were virtuous only because they led to something else. The

Latin word for business, negotium, translates literally as “not-leisure,”

reflecting the view that work was a deviation from the highest human

calling. In this understanding of the situation, work might be an

unavoidable necessity for certain people—above all, for the slaves whose

toil made possible the leisure of the citizens of Athens and Rome—but it

was fundamentally undignified, and certainly not the main point of being

alive.

This same essential idea remained intact across centuries of subsequent

historical upheaval: that leisure was life’s center of gravity, the default state

to which work was a sometimes inevitable interruption. Even the onerous

lives of medieval English peasants were suffused with leisure: they

unfolded according to a calendar that was dominated by religious holidays

and saints’ days, along with multiday village festivals, known as “ales,” to

mark momentous occasions such as marriages and deaths. (Or less

momentous ones, like the annual lambing, the season when ewes give birth

—any excuse to get drunk.) Some historians claim that the average country-

dweller in the sixteenth century would have worked for only about 150 days

each year, and while those figures are disputed, nobody doubts that leisure

lay near the heart of almost every life. Apart from anything else, while all

that recreation might have been fun, it wasn’t exactly optional. People faced

strong social pressure not to work all the time: you observed religious

holidays because the church required it; and in a close-knit village, it

wouldn’t have been easy to shirk the other festivities, either. Another result

was that a sense of leisureliness seeped into the crevices of the days people

did spend at work. “The laboring man,” complained the bishop of Durham,

James Pilkington, sometime around 1570, “will take his rest long in the

morning; a good piece of the day is spent afore he comes at his work. Then

he must have his breakfast, though he have not earned it, at his accustomed

hour, else there is grudging and murmuring…At noon he must have his

sleeping time, then his bever in the afternoon, which spendeth a great part

of the day.”

But industrialization, catalyzed by the spread of the clock-time

mentality, swept all that away. Factories and mills required the coordinated

labor of hundreds of people, paid by the hour, and the result was that leisure

became sharply delineated from work. Implicitly, workers were offered a

deal: you could do whatever you liked with your time off, so long as it

didn’t damage—and preferably enhanced—your usefulness on the job. (So

there was a profit motive at play when the upper classes expressed horror at

the lower classes’ enthusiasm for drinking gin: coming to work with a

hangover, because you’d spent your leisure time getting wasted, was a

violation of the deal.) In one narrow sense, this new situation left working

people freer than before, since their leisure was more truly their own than

when church and community had dictated almost everything they did with

it. But at the same time, a new hierarchy had been established. Work, now,

demanded to be seen as the real point of existence; leisure was merely an

opportunity for recovery and replenishment, for the purposes of further

work. The problem was that for the average mill or factory worker,

industrial work wasn’t sufficiently meaningful to be the point of existence:

you did it for the money, not for its intrinsic satisfactions. So now the whole

of life—work and leisure time alike—was to be valued for the sake of

something else, in the future, rather than for itself.

Ironically, the union leaders and labor reformers who campaigned for

more time off, eventually securing the eight-hour workday and the two-day

weekend, helped entrench this instrumental attitude toward leisure,

according to which it could be justified only on the grounds of something

other than pure enjoyment. They argued that workers would use any

additional free time they might be given to improve themselves, through

education and cultural pursuits—that they’d use it, in other words, for more

than just relaxing. But there is something heartbreaking about the

nineteenth-century Massachusetts textile workers who told one survey

researcher what they actually longed to do with more free time: To “look

around to see what is going on.” They yearned for true leisure, not a

different kind of productivity. They wanted what the maverick Marxist Paul

Lafargue would later call, in the title of his best-known pamphlet, The Right

To Be Lazy.

We have inherited from all this a deeply bizarre idea of what it means to

spend your time off “well”—and, conversely, what counts as wasting it. In

this view of time, anything that doesn’t create some form of value for the

future is, by definition, mere idleness. Rest is permissible, but only for the

purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps for some other form of self-

improvement. It becomes difficult to enjoy a moment of rest for itself alone,

without regard for any potential future benefits, because rest that has no

instrumental value feels wasteful.

The truth, then, is that spending at least some of your leisure time

“wastefully,” focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only

way not to waste it—to be truly at leisure, rather than covertly engaged in

future-focused self-improvement. In order to most fully inhabit the only life

you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal

growth. From this perspective, idleness isn’t merely forgivable; it’s

practically an obligation. “If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass

of wine counts for nothing,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, “then production

and wealth are only hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are

capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy.”

Pathological Productivity

And yet here we’ll need to confront a rarely acknowledged truth about rest,

which is that we’re not merely the victims of an economic system that

denies us any opportunity for it. Increasingly, we’re also the kind of people

who don’t actually want to rest—who find it seriously unpleasant to pause

in our efforts to get things done, and who get antsy when we feel as though

we’re not being sufficiently productive. An extreme example is the case of

the novelist Danielle Steel, who in a 2019 interview with Glamour

magazine revealed the secret of how she’d managed to write 179 books by

the time she turned seventy-two, releasing them at the rate of almost seven

per year: by working almost literally all the time, in twenty-hour days, with

a handful of twenty-four-hour writing periods per month, a single week’s

holiday each year, and practically no sleep. (“I don’t get to bed until I’m so

tired I could sleep on the floor,” she was quoted as saying. “If I have four

hours, it’s a really good night for me.”) Steel drew widespread praise for her

“badass” work habits. But it’s surely not unreasonable to perceive, in this

sort of daily routine, the evidence of a serious problem—of a deep-rooted

inability to refrain from using time productively. In fact, Steel herself seems

to concede that she uses productivity as a way to avoid confronting difficult

emotions. Her personal ordeals have included the loss of an adult son to a

drug overdose and no fewer than five divorces—and work, she told the

magazine, is “where I take refuge. Even when bad things have happened in

my personal life, it’s a constant. It’s something solid I can escape into.”

If it seems uncharitable to accuse Steel of being pathologically unable to

relax, I ought to clarify that the malady is widespread. I’ve suffered from it

as acutely as anyone; and unlike Steel, I can’t claim to have brought joy to

millions of readers of romantic fiction as a happy side effect. Social

psychologists call this inability to rest “idleness aversion,” which makes it

sound like just another minor behavioral foible; but in his famous theory of

the “Protestant work ethic,” the German sociologist Max Weber argued that

it was one of the core ingredients of the modern soul. It first emerged,

according to Weber’s account, among Calvinist Christians in northern

Europe, who believed in the doctrine of predestination—that every human,

since before they were born, had been preselected to be a member of the

elect, and therefore entitled to spend eternity in heaven with God after

death, or else as one of the damned, and thus guaranteed to spend it in hell.

Early capitalism got much of its energy, Weber argued, from Calvinist

merchants and tradesmen who felt that relentless hard work was one of the

best ways to prove—to others, but also to themselves—that they belonged

to the former category rather than the latter. Their commitment to frugal

living supplied the other half of Weber’s theory of capitalism: when people

spend their days generating vast amounts of wealth through hard work but

also feel obliged not to fritter it away on luxuries, the inevitable result is

large accumulations of capital.

It must have been a uniquely anguished way to live. There was no

chance that all that hard work could improve the probability that one would

be saved: after all, the whole point of the doctrine of predestination was that

nothing could influence one’s fate. On the other hand, wouldn’t someone

who already was saved naturally demonstrate a tendency toward virtuous

striving and thriftiness? On this fraught understanding, idleness became an

especially anxiety-inducing experience, to be avoided at all costs—not

merely a vice that might lead to damnation if you overindulged in it, as

many Christians had long maintained, but one that might be evidence of the

horrifying truth that you already were damned.

We flatter ourselves that we’ve outgrown such superstitions today. And

yet there remains, in our discomfort with anything that feels too much like

wasting time, a yearning for something not all that dissimilar from eternal

salvation. As long as you’re filling every hour of the day with some form of

striving, you get to carry on believing that all this striving is leading you

somewhere—to an imagined future state of perfection, a heavenly realm in

which everything runs smoothly, your limited time causes you no pain, and

you’re free of the guilty sense that there’s more you need to be doing in

order to justify your existence. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised when

the activities with which we fill our leisure hours increasingly come to

resemble not merely work but sometimes, as in the case of a SoulCycle

class or a CrossFit workout, actual physical punishment—the self-

flagellation of guilty sinners anxious to expunge the stain of laziness before

it’s too late.

To rest for the sake of rest—to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake—

entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t

progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and

that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain

our four thousand weeks of their value. “We are the sum of all the moments

of our lives,” writes Thomas Wolfe, “all that is ours is in them: we cannot

escape it or conceal it.” If we’re going to show up for, and thus find some

enjoyment in, our brief time on the planet, we had better show up for it

now.

Rules for Rest

Given all the blame I’ve been heaping on religion here for the modern

westerner’s inability to relax, it might seem perverse to suggest that we

should look to religion for the antidote as well. But it was members of

religious communities who first understood a crucial fact about rest, which

is that it isn’t simply what occurs by default whenever you take a break

from work. You need ways to make it likely that rest will actually happen.

Friends of mine live in an apartment building on the historically Jewish

Lower East Side of New York that’s equipped with a “Shabbat elevator”:

step inside it between Friday evening and Saturday night, and you’ll find

yourself stopping at every floor, even if nobody wants to get on or off there,

because it’s been programmed to spare Jewish residents and visitors from

having to violate the rule against operating electrical switches on the

sabbath. (In fact, the actual prohibition, laid down in ancient Jewish law, is

against lighting fires, but modern authorities interpret that to include

completing electrical circuits. The other thirty-eight categories of banned

activities have been interpreted as outlawing everything from inflating

water wings at the swimming pool to tearing sheets of toilet paper from a

roll.) Such rules strike many of the rest of us as absurd. But if they are, it’s

an absurdity well tailored to an equally absurd reality about humans, which

is that we need this sort of pressure in order to get ourselves to rest. As the

writer Judith Shulevitz explains:

Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work. The

inventors of the Sabbath understood that it was a much more complicated undertaking. You

cannot downshift casually and easily, the way you might slip into bed at the end of a long day.

As the Cat in the Hat says, “It is fun to have fun but you have to know how.” This is why the

Puritan and Jewish Sabbaths were so exactingly intentional, requiring extensive advance

preparation—at the very least a scrubbed house, a full larder and a bath. The rules did not

exist to torture the faithful. They were meant to communicate the insight that interrupting the

ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will, one that has to be

bolstered by habit as well as social sanction.

The idea of a communal weekly day off seems thoroughly old-fashioned

today, persisting mainly in the memories of those older than about forty—

who can still remember when most stores were open only six days per week

—and in certain strange, vestigial laws, like the one in my city prohibiting

the purchase of liquor before noon on Sundays. As a result, we’re in danger

of forgetting what a radical notion the sabbath always was—radical not

least because, as the former slaves who inaugurated it were at pains to point

out, it applied to everyone without exception. (Shulevitz notes that in the

Torah verses setting out the rules for the Jewish sabbath, the fact that even

slaves must be allowed to rest gets mentioned twice, as if it were an alien

idea, which the text’s author knew would need to be forcefully driven

home.) And since the dawn of capitalism, it’s been radical in a second way:

while capitalism gets its energy from the permanent anxiety of striving for

more, the sabbath embodies the thought that whatever work you’ve

completed by the time that Friday (or Saturday) night rolls around might be

enough—that there might be no sense, for now, in trying to get any more

done. In his book Sabbath as Resistance, the Christian theologian Walter

Brueggemann describes the sabbath as an invitation to spend one day per

week “in the awareness and practice of the claim that we are situated on the

receiving end of the gifts of God.” One need not be a religious believer to

feel some of the deep relief in that idea of being “on the receiving end”—in

the possibility that today, at least, there might be nothing more you need to

do in order to justify your existence.

All the same, it’s surely never been harder to make the requisite

psychological shift than it is today—to pause in your work for long enough

to enter the coherent, harmonious, somehow thicker experience of time that

comes with being “on the receiving end” of life, the feeling of stepping off

the clock into “deep time,” rather than ceaselessly struggling to master it.

Societal pressures used to make it relatively easy to take time off: you

couldn’t go shopping when the shops weren’t open, even if you wanted to,

or work when the office was locked. Besides, you’d be much less likely to

skip church, or Sunday lunch with the extended family, if you knew your

absence would raise eyebrows. Now, though, the pressures all push us in the

other direction: the shops are open all day, every day (and all night, online).

And thanks to digital technology, it’s all too easy to keep on working at

home.

Personal or household rules, such as the increasingly popular idea of a

self-imposed “digital sabbath,” can fill the vacuum to some extent. But they

lack the social reinforcement that comes when everyone else is following

the rule too, so they’re inevitably harder to abide by—and because they’re

reliant on willpower, they’re prone to all the hazards involved in trying to

force yourself to be more “present in the moment,” as explored in the

previous chapter. The other important thing we can do as individuals, in

order to enter the experience of genuine rest, is simply to stop expecting it

to feel good, at least in the first instance. “Nothing is more alien to the

present age than idleness,” writes the philosopher John Gray. He adds:

“How can there be play in a time when nothing has meaning unless it leads

to something else?” In such an era, it’s virtually guaranteed that truly

stopping to rest—as opposed to training for a 10K, or heading off on a

meditation retreat with the goal of attaining spiritual enlightenment—is

initially going to provoke some serious feelings of discomfort, rather than

of delight. That discomfort isn’t a sign that you shouldn’t be doing it,

though. It’s a sign that you definitely should.

Hiking as an End in Itself

It’s just after half past seven on a rainy morning in midsummer when I park

my car beside the road, zip up my waterproof jacket, and set off by foot into

the high moors of the northern Yorkshire Dales. There’s a splendor to this

terrain that’s most powerful when you’re alone, and in no danger of being

distracted from the barren drama of it all by pleasant conversation. So I’m

happy to be solo as I head uphill, past a waterfall with a satisfyingly Satanic

name—Hell Gill Force—and into open country, where the crunch of my

walking boots sends startled grouse airborne from their hiding places in the

heather. A mile or so farther on, far from any road, I stumble on a tiny

disused stone church with an unlocked door. The silence inside feels settled,

as if it hasn’t been disturbed in years, though in fact there were probably

hikers here as recently as yesterday evening. Twenty minutes later, and I’m

on the moor top, facing into the wind, savoring the bleakness I’ve always

loved. I know there are people who’d prefer to be relaxing on a Caribbean

beach, instead of getting drenched while trudging through gorse bushes

under a glowering sky; but I’m not going to pretend I understand them.

Of course, this is just a country walk, perhaps the most mundane of

leisure activities—and yet, as a way of spending one’s time, it does have

one or two features worth noting. For one thing, unlike almost everything

else I do with my life, it’s not relevant to ask whether I’m any good at it: all

I’m doing is walking, a skill at which I haven’t appreciably improved since

around the age of four. Moreover, a country walk doesn’t have a purpose, in

the sense of an outcome you’re trying to achieve or somewhere you’re

trying to get. (Even a walk to the supermarket has a goal—getting to the

supermarket—whereas on a hike, you either follow a loop or reach a given

point before turning back, so the most efficient way to reach the endpoint

would be never to leave in the first place.) There are positive side effects,

like becoming more physically fit, but that’s not generally why people go

on hikes. Taking a walk in the countryside, like listening to a favorite song

or meeting friends for an evening of conversation, is thus a good example

of what the philosopher Kieran Setiya calls an “atelic activity,” meaning

that its value isn’t derived from its telos, or ultimate aim. You shouldn’t be

aiming to get a walk “done”; nor are you likely to reach a point in life when

you’ve accomplished all the walking you were aiming to do. “You can stop

doing these things, and you eventually will, but you cannot complete them,”

Setiya explains. They have “no outcome whose achievement exhausts them

and therefore brings them to an end.” And so the only reason to do them is

for themselves alone: “There is no more to going for a walk than what you

are doing right now.”

As Setiya recalls in his book Midlife, he was heading toward the age of

forty when he first began to feel a creeping sense of emptiness, which he

would later come to understand as the result of living a project-driven life,

crammed not with atelic activities but telic ones, the primary purpose of

which was to have them done, and to have achieved certain outcomes. He

published papers in philosophy journals in order to speed his path to

academic tenure; he sought tenure in order to achieve a solid professional

reputation and financial security; he taught students in order to achieve

those goals, and also in order to help them attain degrees and launch their

own careers. In other words, he was suffering from the very problem we’ve

been exploring: when your relationship with time is almost entirely

instrumental, the present moment starts to lose its meaning. And it makes

sense that this feeling might strike in the form of a midlife crisis, because

midlife is when many of us first become consciously aware that mortality is

approaching—and mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of

living solely for the future. Where’s the logic in constantly postponing

fulfillment until some later point in time when soon enough you won’t have

any “later” left?

The most unsparingly pessimistic of philosophers, Arthur

Schopenhauer, seems to have seen the emptiness of this sort of life as an

unavoidable result of how human desire functions. We spend our days

pursuing various accomplishments that we desire to achieve; and yet for

any given accomplishment—attaining tenure at your university, say—it’s

always the case either that you haven’t achieved it yet (so you’re

dissatisfied, because you don’t yet have what you desire) or that you’ve

already attained it (so you’re dissatisfied, because you no longer have it as

something to strive toward). As Schopenhauer puts it in his masterwork,

The World as Will and Idea, it’s therefore inherently painful for humans to

have “objects of willing”—things you want to do, or to have, in life—

because not yet having them is bad, but getting them is arguably even

worse: “If, on the other hand, [the human animal] lacks objects of willing,

because it is at once deprived of them again by too easy a satisfaction, a

fearful emptiness and boredom comes over it; in other words, its being and

its existence become an intolerable burden for it. Hence it swings like a

pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom.” But the notion of the

atelic activity suggests there’s an alternative that Schopenhauer might have

overlooked, one that hints at a partial solution to the problem of an overly

instrumentalized life. We might seek to incorporate into our daily lives

more things we do for their own sake alone—to spend some of our time,

that is, on activities in which the only thing we’re trying to get from them is

the doing itself.

Rod Stewart, Radical

There’s a less fancy term that covers many of the activities Setiya refers to

as atelic: they are hobbies. His reluctance to use that word is

understandable, since it’s come to signify something slightly pathetic; many

of us tend to feel that the person who’s deeply involved in their hobby of,

say, painting miniature fantasy figurines, or tending to their collection of

rare cacti, is guilty of not participating in real life as energetically as they

otherwise might. Yet it’s surely no coincidence that hobbies have acquired

this embarrassing reputation in an era so committed to using time

instrumentally. In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a

subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves

alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit. The

derision we heap upon the avid stamp collector or train spotter might really

be a kind of defense mechanism, to spare us from confronting the

possibility that they’re truly happy in a way that the rest of us—pursuing

our telic lives, ceaselessly in search of future fulfillment—are not. This also

helps explain why it’s far less embarrassing (indeed, positively fashionable)

to have a “side hustle,” a hobbylike activity explicitly pursued with profit in

mind.

And so in order to be a source of true fulfillment, a good hobby

probably should feel a little embarrassing; that’s a sign you’re doing it for

its own sake, rather than for some socially sanctioned outcome. My respect

for the rock star Rod Stewart increased a few years back when I learned—

from newspaper coverage of an interview he’d given to Railway Modeler

magazine—that he’d spent the last two decades at work on a vast and

intricate model railway layout of a 1940s American city, a fantasy amalgam

of New York and Chicago complete with skyscrapers, vintage automobiles,

and grimy sidewalks, with the grime hand-painted by Sir Rod himself. (He

brought the layout on tour with him, requesting an additional hotel room to

accommodate it.) Compare Stewart’s hobby with, say, the kitesurfing antics

of the entrepreneur Richard Branson. No doubt Branson sincerely finds

kitesurfing enjoyable. But it’s difficult not to interpret his choice of

recreational activity as a calculated effort to enhance his brand as a

daredevil—whereas Stewart’s model train hobby is so at odds with his

image as the leather-trousered, gravel-voiced singer of “Do Ya Think I’m

Sexy?” that it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion he must genuinely do it

out of love.

There’s a second sense in which hobbies pose a challenge to our

reigning culture of productivity and performance: it’s fine, and perhaps

preferable, to be mediocre at them. Stewart confessed to Railway Modeler

that he isn’t actually all that good at building model train layouts. (He paid

someone else to do the fiddly electrical wiring.) But that might be part of

why he enjoys it so much: to pursue an activity in which you have no hope

of becoming exceptional is to put aside, for a while, the anxious need to

“use time well,” which in Stewart’s case presumably involves the need to

keep on pleasing audiences, selling out stadiums, showing the world he’s

still got it. My other favorite pastime besides hiking—banging out the songs

of Elton John on my electric piano—is so uplifting and absorbing, at least

in part precisely because there’s zero danger of my chimpanzee-level

musicianship ever being rewarded with money or critical acclaim. By

contrast, writing is a far more stressful undertaking, one in which it’s harder

to remain completely absorbed, because I can’t eradicate the hope that I

might accomplish it brilliantly, meeting with high praise or great

commercial success, or at least do it well enough to shore up my sense of

self-worth.

The publisher and editor Karen Rinaldi feels about surfing the same

way that I do about cheesy piano rock, only more so: she dedicates every

spare moment she can to it, and even wiped out her savings on a plot of

land in Costa Rica for better access to the ocean. Yet she readily admits that

she remains an appalling surfer to this day. (It took her five years of

attempting to catch a wave before she first managed to do so.) But “in the

process of trying to attain a few moments of bliss,” Rinaldi explains, “I

experience something else: patience and humility, definitely, but also

freedom. Freedom to pursue the futile. And the freedom to suck without

caring is revelatory.” Results aren’t everything. Indeed, they’d better not be,

because results always come later—and later is always too late.

10.

The Impatience Spiral

f you’ve spent much time in a city where the honking of car horns is

out of control—New York, say, or Mumbai—you’ll know the special

irritation of that sound, which derives from the fact that it isn’t merely

a disruption of the peace and quiet, but overwhelmingly a pointless

disruption, too: it reduces everyone else’s quality of life without improving

the honker’s. In my corner of Brooklyn, the evening rush hour honking

begins around 4:00 p.m. and continues until around eight; and in that stretch

of time, there can’t be more than a handful of honks in the entire borough

that serve a practical purpose, like alerting someone to danger or rousing a

driver who’s failed to notice the light has changed. The message of all the

other honks is simply “Hurry up!” And yet every driver is stuck in the same

traffic, with the same desire to make progress, and the same inability to do

so; no sane honker can seriously believe that his honk will make the critical

difference and get things moving at last. The pointless honk is thus

symptomatic of another important way in which we’re unwilling to

acknowledge our limitations when it comes to our time: it’s a howl of rage

at the fact that the honker can’t prod the world around him into moving as

fast as he’d like it to.

That we suffer when we adopt this sort of dictatorial attitude toward the

rest of reality is one of the central insights of the ancient Chinese religion of

Taoism. The Tao Te Ching is full of images of suppleness and yielding: the

wise man (the reader is constantly being informed) is like a tree that bends

instead of breaking in the wind, or water that flows around obstacles in its

path. Things just are the way they are, such metaphors suggest, no matter

how vigorously you might wish they weren’t—and your only hope of

exercising any real influence over the world is to work with that fact,

instead of against it. Yet the phenomenon of pointless honking, and of

impatience more generally, suggests that most of us are pretty bad Taoists.

We tend to feel as though it’s our right to have things move at the speed we

desire, and the result is that we make ourselves miserable—not just because

we spend so much time feeling frustrated, but because chivying the world to

move faster is frequently counter-productive anyway. For example, traffic

research long ago established that impatient driving behavior tends to slow

you down. (The practice of inching toward the car in front while waiting at

a red light, a classic habit of the restless motorist, is wholly self-defeating—

because once things start moving again, you have to accelerate more slowly

than you otherwise would, so as to avoid rear-ending the vehicle ahead.)

And the same goes for many of our other efforts to force reality’s pace.

Working too hastily means you’ll make more errors, which you’ll then be

obliged to go back to correct; hurrying a toddler to get dressed, in order to

leave the house, is all but guaranteed to make the process last much longer.

Escape Velocity

Though it’s a hard thing to establish scientifically, we’re almost certainly

much more impatient than we used to be. Our decreasing tolerance for

delay is reflected in statistics on everything from road rage and the length of

politicians’ sound bites to the number of seconds the average web user is

prepared to wait for a slow-loading page. (It has been calculated that if

Amazon’s front page loaded one second more slowly, the company would

lose $1.6 billion in annual sales.) And yet at first glance, as I mentioned in

the introduction, this seems exceedingly strange. Virtually every new

technology, from the steam engine to mobile broadband, has permitted us to

get things done more quickly than before. Shouldn’t this therefore have

reduced our impatience, by allowing us to live at something closer to the

speed we’d prefer? Yet since the beginning of the modern era of

acceleration, people have been responding not with satisfaction at all the

time saved but with increasing agitation that they can’t make things move

faster still.

This is another mystery, though, that’s illuminated when you understand

it as a form of resistance to our built-in human limitations. The reason that

technological progress exacerbates our feelings of impatience is that each

new advance seems to bring us closer to the point of transcending our

limits; it seems to promise that this time, finally, we might be able to make

things go fast enough for us to feel completely in control of our unfolding

time. And so every reminder that in fact we can’t achieve such a level of

control starts to feel more unpleasant as a result. Once you can heat your

dinner in the microwave in sixty seconds, it begins to seem genuinely

realistic that you might be able to do so instantaneously, in zero seconds—

and thus all the more maddeningly frustrating that you still have to wait an

entire minute instead. (You’ll have noticed how frequently the office

microwave still has seven or eight seconds left on the clock from the last

person who used it, a precise record of the moment at which the impatience

became too much for them to bear.) Nor will it make much difference,

unfortunately, if you personally manage to muster the inner serenity to

avoid this kind of reaction, because you’ll still end up suffering from

societal impatience—that is, from the wider culture’s rising expectations

about how quickly things ought to happen. Once most people believe that

one ought to be able to answer forty emails in the space of an hour, your

continued employment may become dependent on being able to do so,

regardless of your feelings on the matter.

There may be no more vivid demonstration of this ratcheting sense of

discomfort, of wanting to hasten the speed of reality, than what’s happened

to the experience of reading. Over the last decade or so, more and more

people have begun to report an overpowering feeling, whenever they pick

up a book, that gets labeled “restlessness” or “distraction”—but which is

actually best understood as a form of impatience, a revulsion at the fact that

the act of reading takes longer than they’d like. “I’ve been finding it harder

and harder to concentrate on words, sentences, paragraphs,” laments Hugh

McGuire, the founder of the public domain audiobook service LibriVox and

(at least until recently) a lifelong reader of literary fiction. “Let alone

chapters. Chapters often have page after page of paragraphs.” He describes

what’s shifted in the formerly delicious experience of sliding into bed with

a book: “A sentence. Two sentences. Maybe three. And then…I needed just

a little something else. Something to tide me over. Something to scratch the

itch at the back of my mind—just a quick look at email on my iPhone; to

write, and erase, a response to a funny tweet from William Gibson; to find,

and follow, a link to a good, really good, article in the New Yorker…”

People complain that they no longer have “time to read,” but the reality,

as the novelist Tim Parks has pointed out, is rarely that they literally can’t

locate an empty half hour in the course of the day. What they mean is that

when they do find a morsel of time, and use it to try to read, they find

they’re too impatient to give themselves over to the task. “It is not simply

that one is interrupted,” writes Parks. “It is that one is actually inclined to

interruption.” It’s not so much that we’re too busy, or too distractible, but

that we’re unwilling to accept the truth that reading is the sort of activity

that largely operates according to its own schedule. You can’t hurry it very

much before the experience begins to lose its meaning; it refuses to consent,

you might say, to our desire to exert control over how our time unfolds. In

other words, and in common with far more aspects of reality than we’re

comfortable acknowledging, reading something properly just takes the time

it takes.

Must Stop, Can’t Stop

In the late 1990s, a psychotherapist in California named Stephanie Brown

began to notice certain striking new patterns among the clients who came to

seek her help. Brown’s consulting rooms are in Menlo Park, in the heart of

Silicon Valley, and as the first dot-com boom gathered steam, she found

herself meeting its early casualties: well-paid, highstatus overachievers who

were so accustomed to a life of constant motion and stimulation that

remaining seated for a fifty-minute therapy session seemed to cause them

almost physical pain. It didn’t take Brown long to figure out that their

pulsing sense of urgency was a form of self-medication—something they

were doing as a way not to feel something else. “As soon as I slow down,”

she remembers one woman telling her, in response to the suggestion that

she might consider taking things a little more gently, “the feeling of anxiety

wells up inside, and I look for something to take it away.” Reaching for the

smartphone, diving back into the to-do list, pounding away on the elliptical

machine at the gym—all these forms of high-speed living were serving as

some kind of emotional avoidance. As the months passed, it dawned on

Brown that she recognized this sort of avoidance intimately herself. Her

own experiences of it belonged to a life she’d long since left behind. But

even so, the connection was clear: “These people were talking about exactly

the same thing!” she told me, the thrill of that initial realization still audible

in her voice. The high achievers of Silicon Valley reminded Brown of

herself in her days as an alcoholic.

To understand the significance of this point, it helps to know that

Brown, like many former drinkers, holds in high esteem the twelve-step

philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous, which asserts that alcoholism is

fundamentally a result of attempting to exert a level of control over your

emotions that you can’t ever attain. The future alcoholic first turns to drink

in an effort to escape some painful aspect of experience: Brown started

drinking seriously at the age of sixteen, she said, because it seemed like the

only way to banish a sense of yawning emotional distance between herself

and her parents, both lifelong addicts themselves. “I knew something was

terribly wrong with our family from an early age,” she recalled, “but when

my father first offered me a glass of wedding champagne? I remember I

was thrilled. No reflection at all. It was as if I finally got to join the family.”

At first this strategy seems to work, because drinking does temporarily

numb unpleasant emotions. In the longer run, though, it backfires

disastrously. Despite all your efforts to escape your experience, the truth is

that you’re still where you are—stuck in your dysfunctional family or your

abusive relationship, suffering from depression, or not confronting the

aftermath of childhood trauma—and so the feelings soon return, requiring

stronger drinks in order to numb them. Only now, the alcoholic has

additional problems: as well as struggling to control her emotions through

drink, she must also try to control her drinking, lest it cost her her

relationship, her job, or even her life. She’ll probably start experiencing

more friction at work and at home, and feel shame about her situation—all

of which are triggers for further difficult emotions that are most easily

numbed by more drink. This is the vicious spiral that constitutes the

psychological core of an addiction. You know you must stop, but you also

can’t stop, because the very thing that’s hurting you—alcohol—has come to

feel like the only means of controlling the negative emotions that, in fact,

your drinking is helping to cause.

Perhaps it seems melodramatic to compare “addiction to speed,” as

Brown calls our modern disease of accelerated living, to a condition as

serious as alcoholism. Some people definitely get offended when she does

so. But her point isn’t that compulsive hurry is as physically destructive as

an excess of alcohol. It’s that the basic mechanism is the same. As the

world gets faster and faster, we come to believe that our happiness, or our

financial survival, depends on our being able to work and move and make

things happen at superhuman speed. We grow anxious about not keeping up

—so to quell the anxiety, to try to achieve the feeling that our lives are

under control, we move faster. But this only generates an addictive spiral.

We push ourselves harder to get rid of anxiety, but the result is actually

more anxiety, because the faster we go, the clearer it becomes that we’ll

never succeed in getting ourselves or the rest of the world to move as fast as

we feel is necessary. (Meanwhile, we suffer the other effects of moving too

fast: poor work output, a worse diet, damaged relationships.) Yet the only

thing that feels feasible, as a way of managing all this additional anxiety, is

to move faster still. You know you must stop accelerating, yet it also feels

as though you can’t.

This way of life isn’t wholly unpleasant: just as alcohol gives the

alcoholic a buzz, there’s an intoxicating thrill to living at warp speed. (As

the science writer James Gleick points out, it’s no coincidence that another

meaning of the word “rush” is “a feeling of exhilaration.”) But as a way of

achieving peace of mind, it’s doomed to fail. And whereas if you find

yourself sliding into alcoholism, compassionate friends may try to

intervene, to help steer you in the direction of a healthier life, speed

addiction tends to be socially celebrated. Your friends are more likely to

praise you for being “driven.”

The futility of this situation—in which the addict’s efforts to regain

control send him spiraling further out of control—is the basis of the

paradoxical-sounding insight for which Alcoholics Anonymous has become

famous: that you can’t truly hope to beat alcohol until you give up all hope

of beating alcohol. This necessary shift in outlook generally happens as a

result of “hitting rock bottom,” which is AA-speak for when things get so

bad that you’re no longer able to fool yourself. At that point, it becomes

impossible for the alcoholic to avoid surrendering to the unpalatable truth of

his limitations—to see that he simply doesn’t have the ability to use alcohol

as a strategic tool to suppress his most difficult emotions. (“We admitted,”

reads the first of the Twelve Steps, that “we were powerless over alcohol—

that our lives had become unmanageable.”) Only then, having abandoned

the destructive attempt to achieve the impossible, can he get to work on

what actually is possible: facing reality—above all, the reality that, in his

case, there’s no level of moderate drinking that’s compatible with living a

functioning life—then working, slowly and soberly, to fashion a more

productive and fulfilling existence.

Likewise, Brown argues, we speed addicts must crash to earth. We have

to give up. You surrender to the reality that things just take the time they

take, and that you can’t quiet your anxieties by working faster, because it

isn’t within your power to force reality’s pace as much as you feel you need

to, and because the faster you go, the faster you’ll feel you need to go. If

you can let those fantasies crumble, Brown’s clients discovered, something

unexpected happens, analogous to the alcoholic giving up his unrealistic

craving for control in exchange for the gritty, down-to-earth, reality-

confronting experience of recovery. Psychotherapists call it a “second-order

change,” meaning that it’s not an incremental improvement but a change in

perspective that reframes everything. When you finally face the truth that

you can’t dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety,

and your anxiety is transformed. Digging in to a challenging work project

that can’t be hurried becomes not a trigger for stressful emotions but a

bracing act of choice; giving a difficult novel the time it demands becomes

a source of relish. “You cultivate an appreciation for endurance, hanging in,

and putting the next foot forward,” Brown explains. You give up

“demanding instant resolution, instant relief from discomfort and pain, and

magical fixes.” You breathe a sigh of relief, and as you dive into life as it

really is, in clear-eyed awareness of your limitations, you begin to acquire

what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of

superpowers: patience.

11.

Staying on the Bus

t’s fair to say that patience has a terrible reputation. For one thing, the

prospect of doing anything that you’ve been told will require patience

simply seems unappetizing. More specifically, though, it’s disturbingly

passive. It is the virtue that has traditionally been urged upon housewives,

while their husbands led more exciting lives outside the home; or on racial

minorities, told to wait just a few more decades for their full civil rights.

The talented but self-effacing employee who “waits patiently” for a

promotion, we tend to feel, will be waiting a long time: she ought to be

trumpeting her achievements instead. In all such cases, patience is a way of

psychologically accommodating yourself to a lack of power, an attitude

intended to help you to resign yourself to your lowly position, in theoretical

hopes of better days to come. But as society accelerates, something shifts.

In more and more contexts, patience becomes a form of power. In a world

geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry—to allow things to

take the time they take—is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the

work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of

deferring all your fulfillment to the future.

I first learned this lesson from Jennifer Roberts, who teaches art history

at Harvard University. When you take a class with Roberts, your initial

assignment is always the same, and it’s one that has been known to elicit

yelps of horror from her students: choose a painting or sculpture in a local

museum, then go and look at it for three hours straight. No checking email

or social media; no quick runs to Starbucks. (She reluctantly concedes that

bathroom breaks are allowed.) When I told a friend I planned to visit

Harvard to meet Roberts, and to undertake the painting-viewing exercise

myself, he gave me a look that mixed admiration with fear for my sanity, as

though I’d announced an intention to kayak the Amazon alone. And he

wasn’t entirely wrong to worry about my mental health. There were long

moments, as I squirmed in my seat at the Harvard Art Museum during the

assignment, when I’d willingly have done countless things I usually can’t

stand—shopping for clothes, assembling flat-pack furniture, stabbing

myself in the thigh with thumbtacks—simply because I could have done

them in a rush, instead of having to be patient.

Such reactions come as no surprise to Roberts. She insists on the

exercise lasting three hours precisely because she knows it’s a painfully

long time, especially for anyone accustomed to a life of speed. She wants

people to experience firsthand how strangely excruciating it is to be stuck in

position, unable to force the pace, and why it’s so worthwhile to push past

those feelings to what lies beyond. The idea first arose, Roberts told me,

because her students faced so many external pressures to move fast—from

digital technology, but also from Harvard’s ultracompetitive atmosphere—

that she began to feel it was insufficient for a teacher like her merely to

hand out assignments and wait for the results. She felt she would be failing

in her duties if she didn’t also attempt to influence the tempo at which her

students worked, helping them slow down to the speed that art demands.

“They needed someone to give them permission to spend this kind of time

on anything,” she said. “Somebody had to give them a different set of rules

and constraints than the ones that were dominating their lives.”

Certain art forms impose temporal restraints on their audience in a

rather obvious way: when you watch, say, a live performance of The

Marriage of Figaro or a screening of Lawrence of Arabia, you don’t have

much choice but to let the work in question take its time. But other kinds,

including painting, benefit from external restraints—because it’s all too

easy to tell yourself that once you’ve taken a couple of seconds to look at a

painting, you’ve thereby genuinely seen it. So to prevent her students from

rushing the assignment, Roberts had to make “not rushing” the assignment

itself.

She undertook the exercise herself, too, with a painting called Boy with

a Squirrel, by the American artist John Singleton Copley. (It shows a boy

with a squirrel.) “It took me nine minutes to notice that the shape of the

boy’s ear precisely echoes that of the ruff along the squirrel’s belly,”

Roberts later wrote, “and that Copley was making some kind of connection

between the animal and the human body…It took a good 45 minutes before

I realized that the seemingly random folds and wrinkles in the background

curtain were actually perfect copies of the boy’s ear and eye.”

There is nothing passive or resigned about the kind of patience that

arises from this effort to resist the urge to hurry. On the contrary, it’s an

active, almost muscular state of alert presence—and its benefits, as we’ll

see, extend far beyond art appreciation. But for the record, here is what

happens when you spend three unbroken hours in a small foldout seat at the

Harvard Art Museum looking at Cotton Merchants in New Orleans, a

painting by Edgar Degas, with your phone, laptop, and other distractions

stowed out of reach in the cloakroom: You spend the first forty minutes

wondering what on earth you’d been thinking. You remember—how could

you ever have forgotten?—that you’ve always hated art galleries, especially

the way their shuffling crowds of visitors impart a sort of contagious

lethargy to the air. You contemplate switching paintings, from a work that

now strikes you as a self-evidently tedious choice (it shows three men, in a

room, inspecting some bales of cotton) to a nearby alternative, which seems

to show many tiny souls being tortured in hell. But then you’re forced to

admit to yourself that making a fresh start, by picking a new painting,

would be to succumb to the very impatience you’re here to learn to resist—

an attempt to seize control over your experience in precisely the way you’re

seeking to avoid. And so you wait. Grumpiness gives way to fatigue, then

restless irritation. Time slows and sags. You wonder if an hour has passed,

but when you check your watch, you find it’s been seventeen minutes.

And then, around the eighty-minute mark, but without your noticing

precisely when or how it happens, there’s a shift. You finally give up

attempting to escape the discomfort of time passing so slowly, and the

discomfort abates. And the Degas begins to reveal its secret details: subtle

expressions of watchfulness and sadness on the faces of the three men—one

of whom, you notice properly for the first time, is a Black merchant in an

otherwise white milieu—plus an unexplained shadow you hadn’t previously

seen, as if a fourth person were lurking out of view; and a curious optical

illusion that renders one of the figures either conventionally solid or

transparent, like a ghost, depending on how your eyes interpret the

painting’s other lines. Before long, you’re experiencing the scene in all its

sensory fullness: the humidity and claustrophobia of that room in New

Orleans, the creak of the floorboards, the taste of dust in the air.

The second-order change has occurred: now that you’ve abandoned

your futile efforts to dictate the speed at which the experience moves, the

real experience can begin. And you start to understand what the philosopher

Robert Grudin means when he describes the experience of patience as

“tangible, almost edible,” as if it gives things a kind of chewiness—the

word is inadequate, but it’s the closest one there is—into which you can

sink your teeth. Your reward for surrendering the fantasy of controlling the

pace of reality is to achieve, at last, a real sense of purchase on that reality.

Or, to use the Britishism, of really getting stuck in to life.

Watching and Waiting

In his book The Road Less Traveled, the psychotherapist M. Scott Peck

recounts a transformative experience of surrendering to the speed of reality

—one that emphasizes that patience isn’t merely a more peaceful and

present-oriented way to live but a concretely useful skill. Until the age of

thirty-seven, Peck explains, he considered himself a “mechanical idiot,”

almost entirely inept when it came to fixing household appliances, cars,

bicycles, and suchlike. Then one day he came upon a neighbor who was

midway through fixing his lawn mower, and paid him a self-deprecating

compliment: “Boy, I sure admire you. I’ve never been able to fix those

kinds of things!”

“That’s because you don’t take the time,” the neighbor replied—a

comment that gnawed at Peck, troubling something in his soul, and that

resurfaced a few weeks later when the parking brake on a car belonging to

one of his therapy patients became stuck. Normally, he writes, he would

have “immediately yanked at a few wires without having the foggiest idea

of what I was doing, and then, when nothing constructive resulted, would

have thrown up my hands and proclaimed ‘It’s beyond me!’ ” This time,

though, Peck remembered his neighbor’s admonition:

I lay down on the floor beneath the front seat of [the] car. Then I took the time to make

myself comfortable. Once I was comfortable, I then took the time to look at the situation…At

first all I saw was a confusing jumble of wires and tubes and rods, whose meaning I did not

know. But gradually, in no hurry, I was able to focus my sight on the brake apparatus and

trace its course. And then it became clear to me that there was a little latch preventing the

brake from being released. I slowly studied this latch until it became clear to me that if I were

to push it upward with the tip of my finger, it would move easily and would release the brake.

And so I did this. One single motion, one ounce of pressure from a fingertip, and the problem

was solved. I was a master mechanic!

Peck’s insight here—that if you’re willing to endure the discomfort of

not knowing, a solution will often present itself—would be helpful enough

if it were merely a piece of advice for fixing lawn mowers and cars. But his

larger point is that it applies almost everywhere in life: to creative work and

relationship troubles, politics and parenting. We’re made so uneasy by the

experience of allowing reality to unfold at its own speed that when we’re

faced with a problem, it feels better to race toward a resolution—any

resolution, really, so long as we can tell ourselves we’re “dealing with” the

situation, thereby maintaining the feeling of being in control. So we snap at

our partners, rather than hearing them out, because waiting and listening

would make us feel—correctly—as though we weren’t in control of the

situation. Or we abandon difficult creative projects, or nascent romantic

relationships, because there’s less uncertainty in just calling things off than

in waiting to see how they might develop. Peck recalls one patient, an

accomplished financial analyst in her professional life, who took this same

rushed approach to the challenge of disciplining her children: “Either she

made the very first change that came to her mind within a matter of seconds

—making them eat more breakfast or sending them to bed earlier—

regardless of whether such a change had anything to do with the problem,

or else she came to her next therapy session…despairing: ‘It’s beyond me.

What shall I do?’ ”

Three Principles of Patience

In practical terms, three rules of thumb are especially useful for harnessing

the power of patience as a creative force in daily life. The first is to develop

a taste for having problems. Behind our urge to race through every obstacle

or challenge, in an effort to get it “dealt with,” there’s usually the unspoken

fantasy that you might one day finally reach the state of having no problems

whatsoever. As a result, most of us treat the problems we encounter as

doubly problematic: first because of whatever specific problem we’re

facing; and second because we seem to believe, if only subconsciously, that

we shouldn’t have problems at all. Yet the state of having no problems is

obviously never going to arrive. And more to the point, you wouldn’t want

it to, because a life devoid of all problems would contain nothing worth

doing, and would therefore be meaningless. Because what is a “problem,”

really? The most generic definition is simply that it’s something that

demands that you address yourself to it—and if life contained no such

demands, there’d be no point in anything. Once you give up on the

unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to

develop an appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging

with problem after problem, giving each one the time it requires—that the

presence of problems in your life, in other words, isn’t an impediment to a

meaningful existence but the very substance of one.

The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism. The

psychology professor Robert Boice spent his career studying the writing

habits of his fellow academics, reaching the conclusion that the most

productive and successful among them generally made writing a smaller

part of their daily routine than the others, so that it was much more feasible

to keep going with it day after day. They cultivated the patience to tolerate

the fact that they probably wouldn’t be producing very much on any

individual day, with the result that they produced much more over the long

term. They wrote in brief daily sessions—sometimes as short as ten

minutes, and never longer than four hours—and they religiously took

weekends off. The panicked PhD students in whom Boice tried to inculcate

this regimen rarely had the forbearance to hear it. They had looming

deadlines, they protested, and couldn’t afford such self-indulgent work

habits. They needed their dissertations finished, and fast! But for Boice, that

reaction just proved his point. It was precisely the students’ impatient desire

to hasten their work beyond its appropriate pace, to race on to the point of

completion, that was impeding their progress. They couldn’t stand the

discomfort that arose from being forced to acknowledge their limited

control over the speed of the creative process—and so they sought to escape

it, either by not getting down to work at all, or by rushing headlong into

stressful all-day writing binges, which led to procrastination later on,

because it made them learn to hate the whole endeavor.

One critical aspect of the radical incrementalist approach, which runs

counter to much mainstream advice on productivity, is thus to be willing to

stop when your daily time is up, even when you’re bursting with energy and

feel as though you could get much more done. If you’ve decided to work on

a given project for fifty minutes, then once fifty minutes have elapsed, get

up and walk away from it. Why? Because as Boice explained, the urge to

push onward beyond that point “includes a big component of impatience

about not being finished, about not being productive enough, about never

again finding such an ideal time” for work. Stopping helps strengthen the

muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and

again, and thus to sustain your productivity over an entire career.

The final principle is that, more often than not, originality lies on the far

side of unoriginality. The Finnish American photographer Arno Minkkinen

dramatizes this deep truth about the power of patience with a parable about

Helsinki’s main bus station. There are two dozen platforms there, he

explains, with several different bus lines departing from each one—and for

the first part of its journey, each bus leaving from any given platform takes

the same route through the city as all the others, making identical stops.

Think of each stop as representing one year of your career, Minkkinen

advises photography students. You pick an artistic direction—perhaps you

start working on platinum studies of nudes—and you begin to accumulate a

portfolio of work. Three years (or bus stops) later, you proudly present it to

the owner of a gallery. But you’re dismayed to be told that your pictures

aren’t as original as you thought, because they look like knockoffs of the

work of the photographer Irving Penn; Penn’s bus, it turns out, had been on

the same route as yours. Annoyed at yourself for having wasted three years

following somebody else’s path, you jump off that bus, hail a taxi, and

return to where you started at the bus station. This time, you board a

different bus, choosing a different genre of photography in which to

specialize. But a few stops later, the same thing happens: you’re informed

that your new body of work seems derivative, too. Back you go to the bus

station. But the pattern keeps on repeating: nothing you produce ever gets

recognized as being truly your own.

What’s the solution? “It’s simple,” Minkkinen says. “Stay on the bus.

Stay on the fucking bus.” A little farther out on their journeys through the

city, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as

they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. That’s

where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who

can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage—the

trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and

accumulating experience.

The implications of this insight aren’t confined to creative work. In

many areas of life, there’s strong cultural pressure to strike out in a unique

direction—to spurn the conventional options of getting married, or having

kids, or remaining in your hometown, or taking an office job, in favor of

something apparently more exciting and original. Yet if you always pursue

the unconventional in this way, you deny yourself the possibility of

experiencing those other, richer forms of uniqueness that are reserved for

those with the patience to travel the well-trodden path first. As in Jennifer

Roberts’s three-hour painting-viewing exercise, this begins with the

willingness to stop and be where you are—to engage with that part of the

journey, too, instead of always badgering reality to hurry up. To experience

the profound mutual understanding of the long-married couple, you have to

stay married to one person; to know what it’s like to be deeply rooted in a

particular community and place, you have to stop moving around. Those are

the kinds of meaningful and singular accomplishments that just take the

time they take.

12.

The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad

atience isn’t the only way in which it’s possible to find a deeper sort

of freedom in surrendering to temporal constraints, instead of

always trying to dictate how things unfold. Another concerns the

perpetually irritating phenomenon of other human beings—who, as I take it

you’ve noticed, are always impinging on your time in countless frustrating

ways. It’s a principle common to virtually all productivity advice that, in an

ideal world, the only person making decisions about your time would be

you: you’d set your own hours, work wherever you chose, take vacations

when you wished, and generally be beholden to nobody. But there’s a case

to be made that this degree of control comes at a cost that’s ultimately not

worth paying.

Whenever I’m feeling resentful about deadlines, or the toddler’s

unpredictable sleep patterns, or other incursions upon my temporal

sovereignty, I try to remember the cautionary tale of Mario Salcedo, a

Cuban American financial consultant who almost certainly holds the record

for the number of nights spent aboard cruise ships. There’s little question

that Super Mario—as he’s known to the staff of Royal Caribbean Cruises,

the firm to which he’s been loyal for most of his two decades, as a resident

of the oceans, with the 2020 coronavirus pandemic the only major

interruption—is in full control of his time. “I don’t have to take out the

garbage, I don’t have to clean, I don’t have to do laundry—I’ve eliminated

all those non-value-added activities, and just have all the time in the world

to enjoy what I like to do,” he once told the filmmaker Lance Oppenheim,

poolside on board the Enchantment of the Seas. But it’ll come as no

surprise, presumably, to learn that he doesn’t seem all that happy. In

Oppenheim’s short film, The Happiest Guy in the World, Salcedo prowls

the decks, cocktail in hand, staring out to sea, eliciting tight-lipped smiles

and reluctant pecks on the cheek from the people he refers to as his

“friends”—the employees of Royal Caribbean Cruises—and complaining

that he can’t get Fox News on the television in his cabin. “I’m probably the

happiest guy in the world!” he informs random groups of other passengers,

rather too insistently; and they smile and nod, and politely pretend that they

envy him.

Of course, it’s not my place to assert that Salcedo isn’t as happy as he

claims. Perhaps he is. But I do know that I wouldn’t be, were I living his

life. The problem, I think, is that his lifestyle is predicated on a

misunderstanding about the value of time. To borrow from the language of

economics, Salcedo sees time as a regular kind of “good”—a resource that’s

more valuable to you the more of it you command. (Money is the classic

example: it’s better to control more of it than less.) Yet the truth is that time

is also a “network good,” one that derives its value from how many other

people have access to it, too, and how well their portion is coordinated with

yours. Telephone networks are the obvious example here: telephones are

valuable to the extent that others also have them. (The more people who

own phones, the more beneficial it is for you to own one; and unlike money,

there’s little point in accumulating as many phones as possible for your

personal use.) Social media platforms follow the same logic. What matters

isn’t how many Facebook profiles you have, but that others have them, too,

and that they’re linked to yours.

As with money, it’s good to have plenty of time, all else being equal.

But having all the time in the world isn’t much use if you’re forced to

experience it all on your own. To do countless important things with time—

to socialize, go on dates, raise children, launch businesses, build political

movements, make technological advances—it has to be synchronized with

other people’s. In fact, having large amounts of time but no opportunity to

use it collaboratively isn’t just useless but actively unpleasant—which is

why, for premodern people, the worst of all punishments was to be

physically ostracized, abandoned in some remote location where you

couldn’t fall in with the rhythms of the tribe. And yet in achieving so much

dominion over his time, Super Mario seems to have imposed a slightly

milder version of the same fate on himself.

In and Out of Sync

The truly troubling thought, though, is that those of us who’d never dream

of choosing a lifestyle like Salcedo’s might nonetheless be guilty of the

same basic mistake—of treating our time as something to hoard, when it’s

better approached as something to share, even if that means surrendering

some of your power to decide exactly what you do with it and when. The

quest for more individual control over my time, I have to admit, was a

major motivation behind my decision to leave my job at a newspaper to

become a work-from-home writer. And it’s the implicit rationale behind

many workplace policies we tend to think of as unquestionably good, such

as parent-friendly flextime and arrangements that give employees the option

of working remotely, which seem certain to become much more common

after the experience of lockdown during the pandemic. “A person with a

flexible schedule and average resources will be happier than a rich person

who has everything except a flexible schedule,” advises the cartoonist

turned self-help guru Scott Adams, summarizing the ethos of individual

time sovereignty. And so, he goes on, “step one in your search for

happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule.”

The most extreme expression of this outlook is the modern lifestyle choice

of becoming a “digital nomad”—someone who liberates herself from the rat

race in order to travel the globe with her laptop, operating her internet

business from a Guatemalan beach or Thai mountaintop, as her fancy

dictates.

But “digital nomad” is a misnomer—and an instructive one. Traditional

nomads aren’t solitary wanderers who just happen to lack laptops; they’re

intensely group-focused people who, if anything, have less personal

freedom than members of settled tribes, since their survival depends on

their working together successfully. And in their more candid moments,

digital nomads will admit that the chief problem with their lifestyle is the

acute loneliness. “Last year, I visited 17 countries; this year, I will visit 10,”

the author Mark Manson wrote, back when he was still a nomad himself.

“Last year, I saw the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China and Machu Picchu

in the span of three months…But I did all this alone.” A fellow wanderer,

Manson learned, “burst into tears in a small suburb in Japan watching

families ride their bikes together in a park,” as it dawned on him that his

supposed freedom—his theoretical ability to do whatever he wanted,

whenever he chose—had put such ordinary pleasures beyond reach.

The point, to be clear, isn’t that freelancing or long-term travel—let

alone family-friendly workplace policies—are intrinsically bad things. It’s

that they come with an unavoidable flip side: every gain in personal

temporal freedom entails a corresponding loss in how easy it is to

coordinate your time with other people’s. The digital nomad’s lifestyle lacks

the shared rhythms required for deep relationships to take root. For the rest

of us, likewise, more freedom to choose when and where you work makes it

harder to forge connections through your job, as well as less likely you’ll be

free to socialize when your friends are.

In 2013, a researcher from Uppsala in Sweden named Terry Hartig,

along with several colleagues, elegantly proved the connection between

synchronization and life satisfaction when he had the ingenious notion of

comparing Swedes’ vacation patterns against statistics on the rate at which

pharmacists dispensed antidepressants. One of his two central findings was

unremarkable: when Swedes take time off work, they’re happier (as

measured by their being less likely, on average, to need antidepressants).

But the other was revelatory: antidepressant use fell by a greater degree,

Hartig demonstrated, in proportion to how much of the population of

Sweden was on vacation at any given time. Or to put things slightly

differently, the more Swedes who were off work simultaneously, the

happier people got. They derived psychological benefits not merely from

vacation time, but from having the same vacation time as other people.

When many were on vacation at once, it was as if an intangible,

supernatural cloud of relaxation had settled over the nation as a whole.

Except that when you think about it, this makes perfect, non-

supernatural sense. It’s much easier to nurture relationships with family and

friends when they’re off work, too. Meanwhile, if you can be sure the whole

office is deserted while you’re trying to relax, you’re spared the anxiety of

thinking about all the undone tasks that might be accumulating, the emails

filling up your inbox, or the scheming colleagues attempting to steal your

job. Nonetheless, there was something a little spooky about how widely the

beneficial effects of synchronized vacation rippled through the country.

Hartig showed that even retired people, despite not having jobs from which

to take a break, were happier when more of the Swedish workforce was on

holiday. That finding echoed other research, which has demonstrated that

people in long-term unemployment get a happiness boost when the

weekend arrives, just like employed people relaxing after a busy workweek,

though they don’t have a workweek in the first place. The reason is that part

of what makes weekends fun is getting to spend time with others who are

also off work—plus, for the unemployed, the weekend offers respite from

feelings of shame that they ought to be working when they aren’t.

Hartig did not flinch from the controversial implication of his results.

They suggest, he observed, that what people need isn’t greater individual

control over their schedules but rather what he calls “the social regulation

of time”: greater outside pressure to use their time in particular ways. That

means more willingness to fall in with the rhythms of community; more

traditions like the sabbath of decades past, or the French phenomenon of the

grandes vacances, where almost everything grinds to a halt for several

weeks each summer. Perhaps it even means more laws to regulate when

people can and can’t work, like limits on Sunday store openings or recent

European legislation banning certain employers from sending work emails

out of hours.

On a work trip to Sweden a few years back, I experienced a micro-level

version of the same idea in the form of the fika, the daily moment when

everyone in a given workplace gets up from their desks to gather for coffee

and cake. The event resembles a well-attended coffee break, except that

Swedes are liable to become mildly offended—which is the equivalent of a

non-Swede becoming severely offended—if you suggest that’s all it is.

Because something intangible but important happens at the fika. The usual

divisions get set aside; people mingle without regard for age, or class, or

status within the office, discussing both work-related and nonwork matters:

for half an hour or so, communication and conviviality take precedence

over hierarchy and bureaucracy. One senior manager told me it was by far

the most effective way to learn what was really going on in his company.

Yet it works only because those involved are willing to surrender some of

their individual sovereignty over their time. You can choose to pause for

coffee at some other time instead, if you insist. But eyebrows may be raised.

The other way to grasp how greatly we benefit from surrendering to

communal time—whether we realize it or not—is to watch what happens

when people are forcibly prevented from doing so. The historian Clive Foss

has described the nightmare that transpired when the leadership of the

Soviet Union, gripped by the desire to transform the nation into one

blazingly efficient machine, set out to reengineer time itself. The Soviets

had long been inspired by the work of the efficiency expert Frederick

Winslow Taylor, whose philosophy of “scientific management” had aimed

to squeeze the maximum possible output from American factory workers.

But now Josef Stalin’s chief economist, Yuri Larin, concocted what seems

in hindsight like a ludicrously ambitious plan to keep Soviet factories

running every day of the year, with no breaks. Henceforth, he announced in

August 1929, a week would be not seven but five days long: four days of

work, followed by one day’s rest. Crucially, though, the idea was that not all

workers would follow the same calendar. Instead, they’d be divided into

five groups, identified by a color—yellow, green, orange, purple, red—each

of which would then be assigned a different four-day workweek and one-

day weekend, so that operations would never have to cease, even for a day.

Meanwhile, Soviet authorities argued, there would be numerous benefits for

the proletariat, too: more frequent days off, plus less overcrowding of

cultural institutions and supermarkets, thanks to the steadier flow of

customers.

But the main effect for ordinary citizens of the USSR, as the writer

Judith Shulevitz has explained, was to destroy the possibility of social life.

It was a simple question of scheduling. Two friends assigned to two

different calendar groups would never be free to socialize on the same day.

Husbands and wives were supposed to be assigned to the same group, but

they often weren’t, placing intense stress on families; and for obvious

reasons, Sunday religious gatherings were disrupted, too—neither of which

posed a problem from Moscow’s point of view, since it was part of

communism’s mission to undermine the rival power centers of family and

church. (E. G. Richards, a historian who chronicled the experiment, noted

that “Lenin’s widow, in good Marxist fashion, regarded Sunday family

reunions as a good enough reason to abolish that day.”) As one worker

rather daringly complained to the official newspaper Pravda: “What are we

to do at home if the wife is in the factory, the children in school, and no one

can come to see us? What is left but to go to the public tea room? What

kind of life is that, when holidays come in shifts, and not for all workers

together? That’s no holiday, if you have to celebrate it by yourself.” The

restructured workweek persisted in some form until 1940, when it was

abandoned because of problems it caused with the maintenance of

machinery. But not before the Soviet government had inadvertently

demonstrated how much of the value of time comes not from the sheer

quantity you have, but from whether you’re in sync with the people you

care about most.

Keeping Together in Time

There is an even more visceral sense, as well, in which time just feels realer

—more intense, more vivid, more filled with meaning—when you’re

synchronized well with others. In 1941, a young American named William

McNeill was drafted into the United States Army and sent for basic training

at a camp on a dusty expanse of Texas scrubland. Nominally, his task was to

learn how to fire antiaircraft guns, but since the camp had only one such

gun among thousands of trainees, and since even that gun wasn’t fully

functional, the officers in charge filled the long stretches of empty time with

traditional military marching drills instead. On the face of it, as even a

novice like McNeill understood, such exercises were completely pointless:

by the time of the Second World War, troops were being transported across

large distances in trucks and trains, not on foot; and in the era of the

machine gun, to engage in formal marching in the heat of battle itself was

essentially asking the enemy to slaughter you. And so McNeill was

unprepared for the way in which the experience of marching with his fellow

soldiers overwhelmed him:

Marching aimlessly about on the drill field, swaggering in conformity with prescribed

military postures, conscious only of keeping in step so as to make the next move correctly and

in time somehow felt good. Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the

prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what

I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out,

becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual…Moving briskly and

keeping in time was enough to make us feel good about ourselves, satisfied to be moving

together, and vaguely pleased with the world at large.

The experience stuck with McNeill, and after the war, when he became

a professional historian, he returned to the idea in a monograph called

Keeping Together in Time. In it, he argues that synchronized movement,

along with synchronized singing, has been a vastly underappreciated force

in world history, fostering cohesion among groups as diverse as the builders

of the pyramids, the armies of the Ottoman Empire, and the Japanese office

workers who rise from their desks to perform group calisthenics at the start

of each workday. Roman generals were among the first to discover that

soldiers marching in synchrony could be made to travel for far longer

distances before they succumbed to fatigue. And some evolutionary

biologists speculate that music itself—a phenomenon that has proved

difficult to account for in terms of Darwinian natural selection, except as a

pleasurable by-product of more important mechanisms—might have

emerged as a way of coordinating large groups of tribal warriors, who could

move in unison by following rhythms and melodies, where other forms of

communication would have proved too cumbersome for the job.

In daily life, as well, we fall into synchrony all the time, usually without

realizing it: at the theater, applause gradually organizes itself into a rhythm;

and if you walk down the street alongside a friend, or even a stranger, you’ll

soon find your paces starting to match. This subliminal urge toward

coordinated action is so powerful that even sworn rivals can’t resist it. It

would be difficult to imagine two men more committed to defeating each

other—on a conscious level, at least—than the sprinters Usain Bolt and

Tyson Gay, competing for the men’s hundred-meter title at the World

Athletics Championships in 2009. But a study based on a frame-by-frame

analysis of the race shows that despite presumably being consumed by the

desire to win, Bolt couldn’t help falling into line with Gay’s steps. And Bolt

almost certainly benefited as a result: other research has indicated that

conforming to an external rhythm renders one’s gait imperceptibly more

efficient. So it’s likely that Gay, in spite of himself, helped his opponent to

reach a new world record.

And as dancers know, when they lose themselves in the dance,

synchrony is also a portal to another dimension—to that sacred place where

the boundaries of the self grow fuzzy, and time seems not to exist. I’ve felt

it as a member of a community choir, when the sharp and flat tones of

amateur voices combine into a perfection that few of the singers involved

could attain on their own. (The extraordinary psychological benefits of

choral singing, one 2005 study drily concluded, are not reduced “when the

vocal instrument is of mediocre quality.”) For that matter, I’ve felt it in

settings that are even more mundane—working my monthly shift at the

food cooperative, for example, slinging boxes of carrots and broccoli onto

the conveyor belt, in time with other workers I barely know but with whom,

for a few hours, I share a bond that feels deeper than the one I have with

some of my real friends. For a while, it’s as if we’re participating in the

communal rhythms of a monastery, in which the synchronized hours of

prayer and labor impart coherence and a sense of shared purpose to the day.

Something mysterious is at work in such moments—and there may be

no better proof of how potent it is than the fact that it can be harnessed for

dangerous and indeed fatal ends. From the point of view of military

commanders, after all, the chief benefit of synchrony among soldiers isn’t

that they’ll march for longer distances. It’s that once they feel they belong

to something greater than themselves, they’ll be more willing to lay down

their life for their unit. Midway through a rehearsal of Handel’s Messiah in

a high-ceilinged church, it becomes just about possible for an amateur

singer to imagine how a person might enter that state of mind. The world

“doesn’t open up into a million shimmering dimensions of hope and

possibility when I sing alone,” the writer and choir member Stacy Horn

observes. That happens only “when I’m surrounded by my fellow

choristers, and all the different sounds we’re making combine to leave us

thrumming in harmony—lit up together like fireflies flashing in synchrony

by whatever masterpiece is currently racing through our brains, bodies, and

hearts.”

The Freedom to Never See Your Friends

The question is, What kind of freedom do we really want when it comes to

time? On the one hand, there’s the culturally celebrated goal of individual

time sovereignty—the freedom to set your own schedule, to make your own

choices, to be free from other people’s intrusions into your precious four

thousand weeks. On the other hand, there’s the profound sense of meaning

that comes from being willing to fall in with the rhythms of the rest of the

word: to be free to engage in all the worthwhile collaborative endeavors that

require at least some sacrifice of your sole control over what you do and

when. Strategies for achieving the first kind of freedom are the sort of thing

that fills books of productivity advice: ideal morning routines, strict

personal schedules, and tactics for limiting how long you spend answering

email each day, plus homilies on the importance of “learning to say no”—

all of them functioning as bulwarks against the risk that other people might

exert too much influence over how your time gets used. And undoubtedly

these have a role to play: we do need to set firm boundaries so that bullying

bosses, exploitative employment arrangements, narcissistic spouses, or a

guilty tendency toward people-pleasing don’t end up dictating the course of

every day.

And yet the trouble with this kind of individualist freedom, as Judith

Shulevitz points out, is that a society in thrall to it, as ours is, ends up

desynchronizing itself—imposing upon itself something surprisingly

similar, in its results, to the disastrous Soviet experiment with a staggered

five-day week. We live less and less of our lives in the same temporal

grooves as one another. The unbridled reign of this individualist ethos,

fueled by the demands of the market economy, has overwhelmed our

traditional ways of organizing time, meaning that the hours in which we

rest, work, and socialize are becoming ever more uncoordinated. It’s harder

than ever to find time for a leisurely family dinner, a spontaneous visit to

friends, or any collective project—nurturing a community garden, playing

in an amateur rock band—that takes place in a setting other than the

workplace.

For the least privileged, the dominance of this kind of freedom

translates into no freedom at all: it means unpredictable gig-economy jobs

and “on-demand scheduling,” in which the big-box retailer you work for

might call you into work at any moment, its labor needs calculated

algorithmically from hour to hour based on sales volume—making it all but

impossible to plan childcare or essential visits to the doctor, let alone a

night out with friends. But even for those of us who genuinely do have

much more personal control over when we work than previous generations

ever did, the result is that work seeps through life like water, filling every

cranny with more to-dos, a phenomenon that seemed to only intensify

during the coronavirus lockdown. It starts to feel as though you, your

spouse, and your closest friends have all been assigned to different color-

coded Soviet work groups. The reason it’s so hard for my wife and me to

find an hour in the week for a serious conversation, or for me and my three

closest friends to meet for a beer, isn’t usually that we “don’t have the

time,” in the strict sense of that phrase, though that’s what we may tell

ourselves. It’s that we do have the time—but that there’s almost no

likelihood of it being the same portion of time for everyone involved. Free

to pursue our own entirely personal schedules, yet still yoked to our jobs,

we’ve constructed lives that can’t be made to mesh.

All this comes with political implications, too, because grassroots

politics—the world of meetings, rallies, protests, and get-out-the-vote

operations—are among the most important coordinated activities that a

desynchronized population finds it difficult to get around to doing. The

result is a vacuum of collective action, which gets filled by autocratic

leaders, who thrive on the mass support of people who are otherwise

disconnected—alienated from one another, stuck at home on the couch, a

captive audience for televised propaganda. “Totalitarian movements are

mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals,” wrote Hannah Arendt

in The Origins of Totalitarianism. It’s in the interests of an autocrat that the

only real bond among his supporters should be their support for him. On

those occasions when synchronized action does pierce through the isolation,

as during the worldwide demonstrations that followed the killing of George

Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020, it’s not unusual to hear protesters

describe experiences that call to mind William McNeill’s “strange sense of

personal enlargement”—a feeling of time thickening and intensifying,

tinged with a kind of ecstasy.

Like our other troubles with time, our loss of synchrony obviously can’t

be solved exclusively at the level of the individual or the family. (Good luck

persuading everyone in your neighborhood to take the same day off work

each week.) But we do each get to decide whether to collaborate with the

ethos of individual time sovereignty or to resist it. You can push your life a

little further in the direction of the second, communal sort of freedom. For

one thing, you can make the kinds of commitments that remove flexibility

from your schedule in exchange for the rewards of community, by joining

amateur choirs or sports teams, campaign groups or religious organizations.

You can prioritize activities in the physical world over those in the digital

one, where even collaborative activity ends up feeling curiously isolating.

And if, like me, you possess the productivity geek’s natural inclination

toward control-freakery when it comes to your time, you can experiment

with what it feels like to not try to exert an iron grip on your timetable: to

sometimes let the rhythms of family life and friendships and collective

action take precedence over your perfect morning routine or your system

for scheduling your week. You can grasp the truth that power over your

time isn’t something best hoarded entirely for yourself: that your time can

be too much your own.

13.

Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

The Jungian psychotherapist James Hollis recalls the experience of one of

his patients, a successful vice president of a medical instruments company,

who was flying over the American Midwest on a business trip, reading a

book, when she was accosted by a thought: “I hate my life.” A malaise that

had been growing in her for years had crystallized in the understanding that

she was spending her days in a way that no longer felt as if it had any

meaning. The relish she’d had for her work had drained away; the rewards

she’d been pursuing seemed worthless; and now life was a matter of going

through the motions, in the fading hope that it somehow all might yet pay

off in future happiness.

Perhaps you know how she felt. Not everyone has this kind of sudden

epiphany, but many of us know what it is to suspect that there might be

richer, fuller, juicier things we could be doing with our four thousand weeks

—even when what we’re currently doing with them looks, from the outside,

like the definition of success. Or maybe you’re familiar with the experience

of returning to your daily routines, following an unusually satisfying

weekend in nature or with old friends, and being struck by the thought that

more of life should feel that way—that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to

expect the deeply engrossing parts to be more than rare exceptions. The

modern world is especially lacking in good responses to such feelings:

religion no longer provides the universal ready-made sense of purpose it

once did, while consumerism misleads us into seeking meaning where it

can’t be found. But the sentiment itself is an ancient one. The writer of the

book of Ecclesiastes, among many others, would instantly have recognized

the suffering of Hollis’s patient: “Then I considered all that my hands had

done, and the toil I had spent in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a

striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.”

It’s deeply unsettling to find yourself doubting the point of what you’re

doing with your life. But it isn’t actually a bad thing, because it

demonstrates that an inner shift has already occurred. You couldn’t entertain

such doubts in the first place if you weren’t already occupying a new

vantage point on your life—one from which you’d already begun to face

the reality that you can’t depend on fulfillment arriving at some distant

point in the future, once you’ve gotten your life in order, or met the world’s

criteria for success, and that instead the matter needs addressing now. To

realize midway through a business trip that you hate your life is already to

have taken the first step into one you don’t hate—because it means you’ve

grasped the fact that these are the weeks that are going to have to be spent

doing something worthwhile, if your finite life is to mean anything at all.

This is a perspective from which you can finally ask the most fundamental

question of time management: What would it mean to spend the only time

you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you are making it count?

The Great Pause

Sometimes this perceptual jolt affects a whole society at once. I wrote the

first draft of this chapter under lockdown in New York City, during the

coronavirus pandemic, when, amid the grief and anxiety, it became normal

to hear people express a sort of bittersweet gratitude for what they were

experiencing: that even though they were furloughed and losing sleep about

the rent, it was a genuine joy to see more of their children, or to rediscover

the pleasures of planting flowers or baking bread. The enforced pause in

work, school, and socializing put on hold numerous assumptions about how

we had to spend our time. It turned out, for example, that many people

could perform their jobs adequately without an hour-long commute to a

dreary office, or remaining at a desk until 6:30 p.m. solely in order to

appear hardworking. It also turned out that most of the restaurant meals and

takeout coffees I’d grown accustomed to consuming, presumably on the

grounds that they enhanced my life, could be forsworn with no feeling of

loss (a double-edged revelation, given how many jobs depended on

providing them). And it became clear—from the ritual applauding of

emergency workers, grocery runs undertaken for housebound neighbors,

and many other acts of generosity—that people cared about one another far

more than we’d assumed. It was just that before the virus, apparently, we

hadn’t had the time to show it.

Things hadn’t changed for the better, obviously. But alongside the

devastation that it wrought, the virus changed us for the better, at least

temporarily, and at least in certain respects: it helped us perceive more

clearly what our pre-lockdown days had been lacking and the trade-offs

we’d been making, willingly or otherwise—for example, by pursuing work

lives that left no time for neighborliness. A New York writer and director

named Julio Vincent Gambuto captured this sense of what I found myself

starting to think of as “possibility shock”—the startling understanding that

things could be different, on a grand scale, if only we collectively wanted

that enough. “What the trauma has shown us,” Gambuto wrote, “cannot be

unseen. A carless Los Angeles has clear blue skies, as pollution has simply

stopped. In a quiet New York, you can hear the birds chirp in the middle of

Madison Avenue. Coyotes have been spotted on the Golden Gate Bridge.

These are the postcard images of what the world might be like if we could

find a way to have a less deadly effect on the planet.” Of course, the crisis

also revealed underfunded healthcare systems, venal politicians, deep racial

inequities, and chronic economic insecurity. But these, too, contributed to

the feeling that now we were seeing what actually mattered, what

demanded our attention—and that on some level we’d known it all along.

When lockdown ended, Gambuto warned, corporations and

governments would conspire to make us forget the possibilities we’d

glimpsed, by means of shiny new products and services and distracting

culture wars; and we’d be so desperate to return to normality that we’d be

tempted to comply. Instead, though, we could hold on to the sense of

strangeness and make new choices about how we used the hours of our

lives:

What happened is inexplicably incredible. It’s the greatest gift ever unwrapped. Not the

deaths, not the virus, but The Great Pause…Please don’t recoil from the bright light beaming

through the window. I know it hurts your eyes. It hurts mine, too. But the curtain is wide

open…The Great American Return to Normal is coming…[but] I beg of you: take a deep

breath, ignore the deafening noise, and think deeply about what you want to put back into

your life. This is our chance to define a new version of normal, a rare and truly sacred (yes,

sacred) opportunity to get rid of the bullshit and to only bring back what works for us, what

makes our lives richer, what makes our kids happier, what makes us truly proud.

The hazard in any such discussion of “what matters most” in life,

though, is that it tends to give rise to a kind of paralyzing grandiosity. It

starts to feel as though it’s your duty to find something truly consequential

to do with your time—to quit your office job to become an aid worker or

start a space flight company—or else, if you’re in no position to make such

a grand gesture, to conclude that a deeply meaningful life isn’t an option for

you. On the level of politics and social change, it becomes tempting to

conclude that only the most revolutionary, world-transforming causes are

worth fighting for—that it would be meaningless to spend your time, say,

caring for an elderly relative with dementia or volunteering at the local

community garden while the problems of global warming and income

inequality remain unsolved. Among New Age types, this same grandiosity

takes the form of the belief that each of us has some cosmically significant

Life Purpose, which the universe is longing for us to uncover and then to

fulfill.

Which is why it’s useful to begin this last stage of our journey with a

blunt but unexpectedly liberating truth: that what you do with your life

doesn’t matter all that much—and when it comes to how you’re using your

finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.

A Modestly Meaningful Life

The late British philosopher Bryan Magee liked to make the following

arresting point. Human civilization is about six thousand years old, and

we’re in the habit of thinking of this as a staggeringly long time: a vast

duration across which empires rose and fell, and historical periods to which

we give labels such as “classical antiquity” or “the Middle Ages” succeeded

each other in “only-just-moving time—time moving in the sort of way a

glacier moves.” But now consider the matter a different way. In every

generation, even back when life expectancy was much shorter than it is

today, there were always at least a few people who lived to the age of one

hundred (or 5,200 weeks). And when each of those people was born, there

must have been a few other people alive at the time who had already

reached the age of one hundred themselves. So it’s possible to visualize a

chain of centenarian lifespans, stretching all the way back through history,

with no spaces in between them: specific people who really lived, and each

of whom we could name, if only the historical record were good enough.

Now for the arresting part: by this measure, the golden age of the

Egyptian pharaohs—an era that strikes most of us as impossibly remote

from our own—took place a scant thirty-five lifetimes ago. Jesus was born

about twenty lifetimes ago, and the Renaissance happened seven lifetimes

back. A paltry five centenarian lifetimes ago, Henry VIII sat on the English

throne. Five! As Magee observed, the number of lives you’d need in order

to span the whole of civilization, sixty, was “the number of friends I

squeeze into my living room when I have a drinks party.” From this

perspective, human history hasn’t unfolded glacially but in the blink of an

eye. And it follows, of course, that your own life will have been a

minuscule little flicker of near-nothingness in the scheme of things: the

merest pinpoint, with two incomprehensibly vast tracts of time, the past and

future of the cosmos as a whole, stretching off into the distance on either

side.

It’s natural to find such thoughts terrifying. To contemplate “the

massive indifference of the universe,” writes Richard Holloway, the former

bishop of Edinburgh, can feel “as disorienting as being lost in a dense

wood, or as frightening as falling overboard into the sea with no-one to

know we have gone.” But there’s another angle from which it’s oddly

consoling. You might think of it as “cosmic insignificance therapy”: When

things all seem too much, what better solace than a reminder that they are,

provided you’re willing to zoom out a bit, indistinguishable from nothing at

all? The anxieties that clutter the average life—relationship troubles, status

rivalries, money worries—shrink instantly down to irrelevance. So do

pandemics and presidencies, for that matter: the cosmos carries on

regardless, calm and imperturbable. Or to quote the title of a book I once

reviewed: The Universe Doesn’t Give a Flying Fuck About You. To

remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale, can feel like putting

down a heavy burden that most of us didn’t realize we were carrying in the

first place.

This sense of relief is worth examining a little more closely, though,

because it draws attention to the fact that the rest of the time, most of us do

go around thinking of ourselves as fairly central to the unfolding of the

universe; if we didn’t, it wouldn’t be any relief to be reminded that in

reality this isn’t the case. Nor is this a phenomenon confined to

megalomaniacs or pathological narcissists, but something much more

fundamental to being human: it’s the understandable tendency to judge

everything from the perspective you occupy, so that the few thousand

weeks for which you happen to be around inevitably come to feel like the

linchpin of history, to which all prior time was always leading up. These

self-centered judgments are part of what psychologists call the

“egocentricity bias,” and they make good sense from an evolutionary

standpoint. If you had a more realistic sense of your own sheer irrelevance,

considered on the timescale of the universe, you’d probably be less

motivated to struggle to survive, and thereby to propagate your genes.

You might imagine, moreover, that living with such an unrealistic sense

of your own historical importance would make life feel more meaningful,

by investing your every action with a feeling of cosmic significance,

however unwarranted. But what actually happens is that this overvaluing of

your existence gives rise to an unrealistic definition of what it would mean

to use your finite time well. It sets the bar much too high. It suggests that in

order to count as having been “well spent,” your life needs to involve

deeply impressive accomplishments, or that it should have a lasting impact

on future generations—or at the very least that it must, in the words of the

philosopher Iddo Landau, “transcend the common and the mundane.”

Clearly, it can’t just be ordinary: After all, if your life is as significant in the

scheme of things as you tend to believe, how could you not feel obliged to

do something truly remarkable with it?

This is the mindset of the Silicon Valley tycoon determined to “put a

dent in the universe,” or the politician fixated on leaving a legacy, or the

novelist who secretly thinks her work will count for nothing unless it

reaches the heights, and the public acclaim, of Leo Tolstoy’s. Less

obviously, though, it is also the implicit outlook of those who glumly

conclude that their life is ultimately meaningless, and that they’d better stop

expecting it to feel otherwise. What they really mean is that they’ve adopted

a standard of meaningfulness to which virtually nobody could ever measure

up. “We do not disapprove of a chair because it cannot be used to boil water

for a nice cup of tea,” Landau points out: a chair just isn’t the kind of thing

that ought to have the capacity to boil water, so it isn’t a problem that it

doesn’t. And it is likewise “implausible, for almost all people, to demand of

themselves that they be a Michelangelo, a Mozart, or an Einstein…There

have only been a few dozen such people in the entire history of humanity.”

In other words, you almost certainly won’t put a dent in the universe.

Indeed, depending on the stringency of your criteria, even Steve Jobs, who

coined that phrase, failed to leave such a dent. Perhaps the iPhone will be

remembered for more generations than anything you or I will ever

accomplish; but from a truly cosmic view, it will soon be forgotten, like

everything else.

No wonder it comes as a relief to be reminded of your insignificance:

it’s the feeling of realizing that you’d been holding yourself, all this time, to

standards you couldn’t reasonably be expected to meet. And this realization

isn’t merely calming but liberating, because once you’re no longer

burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a “life well spent,” you’re

freed to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might

qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time. You’re freed, too, to

consider the possibility that many of the things you’re already doing with it

are more meaningful than you’d supposed—and that until now, you’d

subconsciously been devaluing them, on the grounds that they weren’t

“significant” enough.

From this new perspective, it becomes possible to see that preparing

nutritious meals for your children might matter as much as anything could

ever matter, even if you won’t be winning any cooking awards; or that your

novel’s worth writing if it moves or entertains a handful of your

contemporaries, even though you know you’re no Tolstoy. Or that virtually

any career might be a worthwhile way to spend a working life, if it makes

things slightly better for those it serves. Furthermore, it means that if what

we learn from the experience of the coronavirus pandemic is to become just

a little more attuned to the needs of our neighbors, we’ll have learned

something valuable as a result of the “Great Pause,” no matter how far off

the root-and-branch transformation of society remains.

Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about

your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. To embrace it, to whatever

extent you can. (Isn’t it hilarious, in hindsight, that you ever imagined

things might be otherwise?) Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a

few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something

remarkable” with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to

hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness,

against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead

on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic

significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely—and often

enough, marvelously—really is.

14.

The Human Disease

he fantasy behind so many of our time-related troubles is the one

encapsulated in the title of the book I alluded to in the first chapter:

Master Your Time, Master Your Life, by the time management guru

Brian Tracy. The reason time feels like such a struggle is that we’re

constantly attempting to master it—to lever ourselves into a position of

dominance and control over our unfolding lives so that we might finally

feel safe and secure, and no longer so vulnerable to events.

For some of us, the struggle manifests as the attempt to become so

productive and efficient that we never again have to experience the guilt of

disappointing others, or worry about being fired for underperforming; or so

that we might avoid facing the prospect of dying without having fulfilled

our greatest ambitions. Other people hold off entirely from starting on

important projects or embarking on intimate relationships in the first place

because they can’t bear the anxiety of having committed themselves to

something that might or might not work out happily in practice. We waste

our lives railing against traffic jams and toddlers for having the temerity to

take the time they take, because they’re blunt reminders of how little

control we truly have over our schedules. And we chase the ultimate fantasy

of time mastery—the desire, by the time we die, to have truly mattered in

the cosmic scheme of things, as opposed to being instantly trampled

underfoot by the advancing eons.

This dream of somehow one day getting the upper hand in our

relationship with time is the most forgivable of human delusions because

the alternative is so unsettling. But unfortunately, it’s the alternative that’s

true: the struggle is doomed to fail. Because your quantity of time is so

limited, you’ll never reach the commanding position of being able to handle

every demand that might be thrown at you or pursue every ambition that

feels important; you’ll be obliged to make tough choices instead. And

because you can’t dictate, or even accurately predict, so much of what

happens with the finite portion of time you do get, you’ll never feel that

you’re securely in charge of events, immune from suffering, primed and

ready for whatever comes down the pike.

The Provisional Life

But the deeper truth behind all this is to be found in Heidegger’s mysterious

suggestion that we don’t get or have time at all—that instead we are time.

We’ll never get the upper hand in our relationship with the moments of our

lives because we are nothing but those moments. To “master” them would

first entail getting outside of them, splitting off from them. But where

would we go? “Time is the substance I am made of,” writes Jorge Luis

Borges. “Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a

tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me,

but I am the fire.” There’s no scrambling up to the safety of the riverbank

when the river is you. And so insecurity and vulnerability are the default

state—because in each of the moments that you inescapably are, anything

could happen, from an urgent email that scuppers your plans for the

morning to a bereavement that shakes your world to its foundations.

A life spent focused on achieving security with respect to time, when in

fact such security is unattainable, can only ever end up feeling provisional

—as if the point of your having been born still lies in the future, just over

the horizon, and your life in all its fullness can begin as soon as you’ve

gotten it, in Arnold Bennett’s phrase, “into proper working order.” Once

you’ve cleared the decks, you tell yourself; or once you’ve implemented a

better system of personal organization, or got your degree, or invested a

sufficient number of years in honing your craft; or once you’ve found your

soulmate or had kids, or once the kids have left home, or once the

revolution comes and social justice is established—that’s when you’ll feel

in control at last, you’ll be able to relax a bit, and true meaningfulness will

be found. Until then, life necessarily feels like a struggle: sometimes an

exciting one, sometimes exhausting, but always in the service of some

moment of truth that’s still in the future. Writing in 1970, Marie-Louise von

Franz, the Swiss psychologist and scholar of fairy tales, captured the

otherworldly atmosphere of such an existence:

There is a strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being one is

doing this or that, but whether it is [a relationship with] a woman or a job, it is not yet what is

really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will

come about…The one thing dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to

anything whatever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time

completely, and of being the unique human that one is.

“Entering space and time completely”—or even partially, which may be

as far as any of us ever get—means admitting defeat. It means letting your

illusions die. You have to accept that there will always be too much to do;

that you can’t avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred

speed; that no experience, least of all close relationships with other human

beings, can ever be guaranteed in advance to turn out painlessly and well—

and that from a cosmic viewpoint, when it’s all over, it won’t have counted

for very much anyway.

And in exchange for accepting all that? You get to actually be here. You

get to have some real purchase on life. You get to spend your finite time

focused on a few things that matter to you, in themselves, right now, in this

moment. Maybe it’s worth spelling out that none of this is an argument

against long-term endeavors like marriage or parenting, building

organizations or reforming political systems, and certainly not against

tackling the climate crisis; these are among the things that matter most. But

it’s an argument that even those things can only ever matter now, in each

moment of the work involved, whether or not they’ve yet reached what the

rest of the world defines as fruition. Because now is all you ever get.

It’s tempting to imagine that ending or at least easing the struggle with

time might also make you happy, most or all of the time. But I’ve no reason

to believe that’s true. Our finite lives are filled with all the painful problems

of finitude, from overfilled inboxes to death, and confronting them doesn’t

stop them from feeling like problems—or not exactly, anyway. The peace of

mind on offer here is of a higher order: it lies in the recognition that being

unable to escape from the problems of finitude is not, in itself, a problem.

The human disease is often painful, but as the Zen teacher Charlotte Joko

Beck puts it, it’s only unbearable for as long as you’re under the impression

that there might be a cure. Accept the inevitability of the affliction, and

freedom ensues: you can get on with living at last. The same realization that

struck me on that park bench in Brooklyn struck the French poet Christian

Bobin, he recalls, at a similarly mundane moment: “I was peeling a red

apple from the garden when I suddenly understood that life would only ever

give me a series of wonderfully insoluble problems. With that thought an

ocean of profound peace entered my heart.”

Five Questions

To make this all a little more concrete, it may be useful to ask the following

questions of your own life. It doesn’t matter if answers aren’t immediately

forthcoming; the point, in Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous phrase, is to “live

the questions.” Even to ask them with any sincerity is already to have begun

to come to grips with the reality of your situation and to start to make the

most of your finite time.

1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing

comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?

Pursuing the life projects that matter to you the most will almost always

entail not feeling fully in control of your time, immune to the painful

assaults of reality, or confident about the future. It means embarking on

ventures that might fail, perhaps because you’ll find you lacked sufficient

talent; it means risking embarrassment, holding difficult conversations,

disappointing others, and getting so deep into relationships that additional

suffering—when bad things happen to those you care about—is all but

guaranteed. And so we naturally tend to make decisions about our daily use

of time that prioritize anxiety-avoidance instead. Procrastination,

distraction, commitment-phobia, clearing the decks, and taking on too many

projects at once are all ways of trying to maintain the illusion that you’re in

charge of things. In a subtler way, so too is compulsive worrying, which

offers its own gloomy but comforting sense that you’re doing something

constructive to try to stay in control.

James Hollis recommends asking of every significant decision in life:

“Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?” The question circumvents

the urge to make decisions in the service of alleviating anxiety and instead

helps you make contact with your deeper intentions for your time. If you’re

trying to decide whether to leave a given job or relationship, say, or to

redouble your commitment to it, asking what would make you happiest is

likely to lure you toward the most comfortable option, or else leave you

paralyzed by indecision. But you usually know, intuitively, whether

remaining in a relationship or job would present the kind of challenges that

will help you grow as a person (enlargement) or the kind that will cause

your soul to shrivel with every passing week (diminishment). Choose

uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you

can.

2. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of

productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?

One common symptom of the fantasy of someday achieving total mastery

over time is that we set ourselves inherently impossible targets for our use

of it—targets that must always be postponed into the future, since they can

never be met in the present. The truth is that it’s impossible to become so

efficient and organized that you could respond to a limitless number of

incoming demands. It’s usually equally impossible to spend what feels like

“enough time” on your work and with your children, and on socializing,

traveling, or engaging in political activism. But there’s a deceptive feeling

of comfort in believing that you’re in the process of constructing such a life,

which is due to come into being any day now.

What would you do differently with your time, today, if you knew in

your bones that salvation was never coming—that your standards had been

unreachable all along, and that you’ll therefore never manage to make time

for all you hoped you might? Perhaps you’re tempted to object that yours is

a special case, that in your particular situation you do need to pull off the

impossible, timewise, in order to avert catastrophe. For example, maybe

you’re afraid you’ll be fired and lose your income if you don’t stay on top

of your impossible workload. But this is a misunderstanding. If the level of

performance you’re demanding of yourself is genuinely impossible, then

it’s impossible, even if catastrophe looms—and facing this reality can only

help.

There is a sort of cruelty, Iddo Landau points out, in holding yourself to

standards nobody could ever reach (and which many of us would never

dream of demanding of other people). The more humane approach is to

drop such efforts as completely as you can. Let your impossible standards

crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and

get started on them today.

3. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you

are, not the person you think you ought to be?

A closely related way to postpone the confrontation with finitude—with the

anxiety-inducing truth that this is it—is to treat your present-day life as part

of a journey toward becoming the kind of person you believe you ought to

become, in the eyes of society, a religion, or your parents, whether or not

they’re still alive. Once you’ve earned your right to exist, you tell yourself,

life will stop feeling so uncertain and out of control. In times of political

and environmental crisis, this mindset often takes the form of the belief that

nothing is truly worth doing with your time except addressing such

emergencies head-on, around the clock—and that you’re entirely correct to

think of yourself as guilty and selfish for spending it on anything else.

This quest to justify your existence in the eyes of some outside authority

can continue long into adulthood. But “at a certain age,” writes the

psychotherapist Stephen Cope, “it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no

one really cares what we’re doing with our life. This is a most unsettling

discovery to those of us who have lived someone else’s life and eschewed

our own: no one really cares except us.” The attempt to attain security by

justifying your existence, it turns out, was both futile and unnecessary all

along. Futile because life will always feel uncertain and out of your control.

And unnecessary because, in consequence, there’s no point in waiting to

live until you’ve achieved validation from someone or something else.

Peace of mind, and an exhilarating sense of freedom, comes not from

achieving the validation but from yielding to the reality that it wouldn’t

bring security if you got it.

I’m convinced, in any case, that it is from this position of not feeling as

though you need to earn your weeks on the planet that you can do the most

genuine good with them.

Once you no longer feel the stifling pressure to become a particular kind

of person, you can confront the personality, the strengths and weaknesses,

the talents and enthusiasms you find yourself with, here and now, and

follow where they lead. Perhaps your particular contribution to a world

facing multiple crises isn’t primarily to spend your time pursuing activism,

or seeking electoral office, but on caring for an elderly relative, or making

music, or working as a pastry chef, like my brother-in-law, a strapping

South African you might mistake for a rugby player but whose work

involves concocting intricate structures of spun sugar and butter frosting

that detonate small explosions of joy in their recipients. The Buddhist

teacher Susan Piver points out that it can be surprisingly radical and

discomfiting, for many of us, to ask how we’d enjoy spending our time. But

at the very least, you shouldn’t rule out the possibility that the answer to

that question is an indication of how you might use your time best.

4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like

you know what you’re doing?

It’s easy to spend years treating your life as a dress rehearsal on the

rationale that what you’re doing, for the time being, is acquiring the skills

and experience that will permit you to assume authoritative control of

things later on. But I sometimes think of my journey through adulthood to

date as one of incrementally discovering the truth that there is no institution,

no walk of life, in which everyone isn’t just winging it, all the time.

Growing up, I assumed that the newspaper on the breakfast table must be

assembled by people who truly knew what they were doing; then I got a job

at a newspaper. Unconsciously, I transferred my assumptions of competence

elsewhere, including to people who worked in government. But then I got

to know a few people who did—and who would admit, after a couple of

drinks, that their jobs involved staggering from crisis to crisis, inventing

plausible-sounding policies in the backs of cars en route to the press

conferences at which those policies had to be announced. Even then, I

found myself assuming that this might all be explained as a manifestation of

the perverse pride that British people sometimes take in being shamblingly

mediocre. Then I moved to America—where, it turns out, everyone is

winging it, too. Political developments in the years since have only made it

clearer that the people “in charge” have no more command over world

events than the rest of us do.

It’s alarming to face the prospect that you might never truly feel as

though you know what you’re doing, in work, marriage, parenting, or

anything else. But it’s liberating, too, because it removes a central reason

for feeling self-conscious or inhibited about your performance in those

domains in the present moment: if the feeling of total authority is never

going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities

your all—to put bold plans into practice, to stop erring on the side of

caution. It is even more liberating to reflect that everyone else is in the same

boat, whether they’re aware of it or not.

5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so

much about seeing your actions reach fruition?

A final common manifestation of the desire for time mastery arises from the

unspoken assumption described in chapter 8 as the causal catastrophe: the

idea that the true value of how we spend our time is always and only to be

judged by the results. It follows naturally enough from this outlook that you

should focus your time on those activities for which you expect to be

around to see the results. But in his documentary A Life’s Work, the director

David Licata profiles people who took another path, dedicating their lives

to projects that almost certainly won’t be completed within their lifetimes—

like the father-and-son team attempting to catalog every tree in the world’s

remaining ancient forests, and the astronomer scouring radio waves for

signs of extraterrestrial life from her desk at the SETI Institute in California.

All have the shining eyes of people who know they’re doing things that

matter, and who relish their work precisely because they don’t need to try to

convince themselves that their own contributions will prove decisive or

reach fruition while they’re still alive.

Yet there is a sense in which all work—including the work of parenting,

community-building, and everything else—has this quality of not being

completable within our own lifetimes. All such activities always belong to a

far bigger temporal context, with an ultimate value that will only be

measurable long after we’re gone (or perhaps never, since time stretches on

indefinitely). And so it’s worth asking: What actions—what acts of

generosity or care for the world, what ambitious schemes or investments in

the distant future—might it be meaningful to undertake today, if you could

come to terms with never seeing the results? We’re all in the position of

medieval stonemasons, adding a few more bricks to a cathedral whose

completion we know we’ll never see. The cathedral’s still worth building,

all the same.

The Next Most Necessary Thing

On December 15, 1933, Carl Jung wrote a reply to a correspondent, Frau V.,

responding to several questions on the proper conduct of life, and his

answer is a good one with which to end this book. “Dear Frau V.,” Jung

began, “Your questions are unanswerable, because you want to know how

to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way…If that’s

what you want, you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you

what’s what.” By contrast, the individual path “is the way you make for

yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and

which simply comes into being itself when you put one foot in front of the

other.” His sole advice for walking such a path was to “quietly do the next

and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what

that is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But

if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always

doing something meaningful and intended by fate.” A modified version of

this insight, “Do the next right thing,” has since become a slogan favored

among members of Alcoholics Anonymous, as a way to proceed sanely

through moments of acute crisis. But really, the “next and most necessary

thing” is all that any of us can ever aspire to do in any moment. And we

must do it despite not having any objective way to be sure what the right

course of action even is.

Fortunately, precisely because that’s all you can do, it’s also all that you

ever have to do. If you can face the truth about time in this way—if you can

step more fully into the condition of being a limited human—you will reach

the greatest heights of productivity, accomplishment, service, and

fulfillment that were ever in the cards for you to begin with. And the life

you will see incrementally taking shape, in the rearview mirror, will be one

that meets the only definitive measure of what it means to have used your

weeks well: not how many people you helped, or how much you got done;

but that working within the limits of your moment in history, and your finite

time and talents, you actually got around to doing—and made life more

luminous for the rest of us by doing—whatever magnificent task or weird

little thing it was that you came here for.

Afterword: Beyond Hope

xcept there’s a problem: everything is screwed. Perhaps you’ve

noticed.

A time traveler from an ancient Hindu civilization would have

no difficulty recognizing our era as part of the Kali Yuga, that phase in the

cycle of history when, according to Hindu mythology, everything starts to

unravel: governments crumble, the environment collapses and strange

weather events proliferate, refugees pour across borders, and diseases and

dubious ideologies spread across the world. (Much of that comes almost

verbatim from the Mahabharata, the two-thousand-year-old Sanskrit epic,

so its resemblance to my Twitter timeline is either coincidental or extremely

sinister.) It is true, as more upbeat commentators like to remind us, that

people have always believed they were living in the end times, and that

much of the news these days is really rather good: infant mortality, absolute

poverty, and global inequality are all falling rapidly, while literacy is rising,

and you’re less likely than ever to get killed in a war. Still, those ninety-

four-degree days in the Arctic are real, too, as is the coronavirus pandemic,

the epic wildfires, the dinghies overloaded with desperate migrants. To put

things as mildly as possible, it’s hard to remain entirely confident that

everything will turn out fine.

Why focus on time management in an era like this? It might seem like

the height of irrelevance. But as I’ve sought to make clear, I think that’s

mainly just a consequence of the blinkered focus of most conventional time

management advice. Broaden your perspective a bit, and it’s obvious that in

periods of anxiety and darkness, questions of time use take on fresh

urgency: our success or failure in responding to the challenges we face will

turn entirely on how we use the hours available in the day. The phrase “time

management” might seem to render the whole thing rather mundane. But

then a mundane life—in the sense of the one that’s unfolding here now, in

this very moment—is all that we have to work with.

People sometimes ask Derrick Jensen, the environmentalist who

cofounded the radical group Deep Green Resistance, how he manages to

stay hopeful when everything seems so grim. But he tells them he doesn’t—

and that he thinks that’s a good thing. Hope is supposed to be “our beacon

in the dark,” Jensen notes. But in reality, it’s a curse. To hope for a given

outcome is to place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside

the current moment—the government, for example, or God, or the next

generation of activists, or just “the future”—to make things all right in the

end. As the American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön says, it means relating

to life as if “there’s always going to be a babysitter available when we need

one.” And sometimes that attitude can be justified: if I go to the hospital for

surgery, for instance, I do simply have to hope that the surgeon knows what

he’s doing, because no contribution I can make is likely to make much

difference. But the rest of the time, it means disavowing your own capacity

to change things—which in the context of Jensen’s field, environmental

activism, means surrendering your power to the very forces you were

supposed to be fighting.

“Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the

world,” as Jensen puts it, but by saying that, “they’ve assumed the

destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they’ve stepped

away from their own ability to participate in stopping it.” To give up hope,

by contrast, is to reinhabit the power that you actually have. At that point,

Jensen goes on, “we no longer have to ‘hope’ at all. We simply do the work.

We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make

sure grizzlies survive…When we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re

in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will

somehow not get worse, then we are finally free—truly free—to honestly

start working to resolve it.”

You could think of this book as an extended argument for the

empowering potential of giving up hope. Embracing your limits means

giving up hope that with the right techniques, and a bit more effort, you’d

be able to meet other people’s limitless demands, realize your every

ambition, excel in every role, or give every good cause or humanitarian

crisis the attention it seems like it deserves. It means giving up hope of ever

feeling totally in control, or certain that acutely painful experiences aren’t

coming your way. And it means giving up, as far as possible, the master

hope that lurks beneath all this, the hope that somehow this isn’t really it—

that this is just a dress rehearsal, and that one day you’ll feel truly confident

that you have what it takes.

The key to what Chödrön calls “getting the hang of hopelessness” lies

in seeing that things aren’t going to be okay. Indeed, they’re already not

okay—on a planetary level or an individual one. The Arctic ice is already

melting. The pandemic has already killed millions, and crashed the

economy. The question of how ill-qualified you can be for the American

presidency yet still end up in the White House has already been definitively

answered. Thousands of species are already gone. As one woman said, in a

New York Times article about city-dwellers learning how to survive in the

woods on deer meat and berries: “People say, ‘Oh, when the apocalypse

comes…’ What are you talking about? It’s here.” The world is already

broken. And what’s true of the state of civilization is equally true of your

life: it was always already the case that you would never experience a life

of perfect accomplishment or security. And your four thousand weeks have

always been running out.

It’s a revelation, though: when you begin to internalize all this even just

a bit, the result is not despair, but an energizing surge of motivation. You

come to see that the terrible eventuality against which you’d spent your life

subliminally tensing your muscles, because it would be too appalling to

experience, has already happened—and yet here you are, still alive, at least

for the time being. “Abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of

the beginning,” Chödrön says. You realize that you never really needed the

feeling of complete security you’d previously felt so desperate to attain.

This is a liberation. Once you no longer need to convince yourself that the

world isn’t filled with uncertainty and tragedy, you’re free to focus on doing

what you can to help. And once you no longer need to convince yourself

that you’ll do everything that needs doing, you’re free to focus on doing a

few things that count.

Although another way of making the point that giving up hope doesn’t

kill you, as Jensen points out, is that in a certain sense it does kill you. It

kills the fear-driven, control-chasing, ego-dominated version of you—the

one who cares intensely about what others think of you, about not

disappointing anyone or stepping too far out of line, in case the people in

charge find some way to punish you for it later. You find, Jensen writes, that

“the civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you

died. The victim died.” And the “you” that remains is more alive than

before. More ready for action, but also more joyful, because it turns out that

when you’re open enough to confront how things really are, you’re open

enough to let all the good things in more fully, too, on their own terms,

instead of trying to use them to bolster your need to know that everything

will turn out fine. You get to appreciate life in the droll spirit of George

Orwell, on a stroll through a war-dazed London in early 1946, watching

kestrels darting above the grim shadows of the gasworks, and tadpoles

dancing in roadside streams, and later writing of the experience: “Spring is

here, even in London N1, and they can’t stop you enjoying it.”

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.

But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-

fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for

relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible—the

quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible,

fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to

roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.

Appendix: Ten Tools for Embracing

Your Finitude

n this book, I’ve made the case for embracing the truth about your

limited time and limited control over that time—not simply because

it’s the truth, so you might as well face it, but because it’s actively

empowering to do so. By stepping more fully into reality as it actually is,

you get to accomplish more of what matters, and feel more fulfilled about

it. Here, in addition to the suggestions throughout the text, are ten further

techniques for implementing this limit-embracing philosophy in daily life.

1. Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to

productivity.

Much advice on getting things done implicitly promises that it’ll help you

get everything important done—but that’s impossible, and struggling to get

there will only make you busier (see chapter 2). It’s better to begin from the

assumption that tough choices are inevitable and to focus on making them

consciously and well. Any strategy for limiting your work in progress will

help here (this page), but perhaps the simplest is to keep two to-do lists,

one “open” and one “closed.” The open list is for everything that’s on

your plate and will doubtless be nightmarishly long. Fortunately, it’s not

your job to tackle it: instead, feed tasks from the open list to the closed one

—that is, a list with a fixed number of entries, ten at most. The rule is that

you can’t add a new task until one’s completed. (You may also require a

third list, for tasks that are “on hold” until someone else gets back to you.)

You’ll never get through all the tasks on the open list—but you were never

going to in any case, and at least this way you’ll complete plenty of things

you genuinely care about.

A complementary strategy is to establish predetermined time

boundaries for your daily work. To whatever extent your job situation

permits, decide in advance how much time you’ll dedicate to work—you

might resolve to start by 8:30 a.m., and finish no later than 5:30 p.m., say—

then make all other time-related decisions in light of those predetermined

limits. “You could fill any arbitrary number of hours with what feels to be

productive work,” writes Cal Newport, who explores this approach in his

book Deep Work. But if your primary goal is to do what’s required in order

to be finished by 5:30, you’ll be aware of the constraints on your time, and

more motivated to use it wisely.

2. Serialize, serialize, serialize.

Following the same logic, focus on one big project at a time (or at most,

one work project and one nonwork project) and see it to completion before

moving on to what’s next. It’s alluring to try to alleviate the anxiety of

having too many responsibilities or ambitions by getting started on them all

at once, but you’ll make little progress that way; instead, train yourself to

get incrementally better at tolerating that anxiety, by consciously

postponing everything you possibly can, except for one thing. Soon, the

satisfaction of completing important projects will make the anxiety seem

worthwhile—and since you’ll be finishing more and more of them, you’ll

have less to feel anxious about anyway. Naturally, it won’t be possible to

postpone absolutely everything—you can’t stop paying the bills, or

answering email, or taking the kids to school—but this approach will ensure

that the only tasks you don’t postpone, while addressing your current

handful of big projects, are the truly essential ones, rather than those you’re

dipping into solely to quell your anxiety.

3. Decide in advance what to fail at.

You’ll inevitably end up underachieving at something, simply because your

time and energy are finite. But the great benefit of strategic

underachievement—that is, nominating in advance whole areas of life in

which you won’t expect excellence of yourself—is that you focus that time

and energy more effectively. Nor will you be dismayed when you fail at

what you’d planned to fail at all along. “When you can’t do it all, you feel

ashamed and give up,” notes the author Jon Acuff, but when you “decide in

advance what things you’re going to bomb…you remove the sting of

shame.” A poorly kept lawn or a cluttered kitchen are less troubling when

you’ve preselected “lawn care” or “kitchen tidiness” as goals to which

you’ll devote zero energy.

As with serializing your projects, there’ll be plenty you can’t choose to

“bomb” if you’re to earn a living, stay healthy, be a decent partner and

parent, and so forth. But even in these essential domains, there’s scope to

fail on a cyclical basis: to aim to do the bare minimum at work for the next

two months, for example, while you focus on your children, or let your

fitness goals temporarily lapse while you apply yourself to election

canvassing. Then switch your energies to whatever you were neglecting. To

live this way is to replace the high-pressure quest for “work-life balance”

with a conscious form of imbalance, backed by your confidence that the

roles in which you’re underperforming right now will get their moment in

the spotlight soon.

4. Focus on what you’ve already completed, not

just on what’s left to complete.

Since the quest to get everything done is interminable by definition (this

page), it’s easy to grow despondent and self-reproachful: you can’t feel

good about yourself until it’s all finished—but it’s never finished, so you

never get to feel good about yourself. Part of the problem here is an

unhelpful assumption that you begin each morning in a sort of “productivity

debt,” which you must struggle to pay off through hard work, in the hope

that you might reach a zero balance by the evening. As a counterstrategy,

keep a “done list,” which starts empty first thing in the morning, and

which you then gradually fill with whatever you accomplish through the

day. Each entry is another cheering reminder that you could, after all, have

spent the day doing nothing remotely constructive—and look what you did

instead! (If you’re in a serious psychological rut, lower the bar for what gets

to count as an accomplishment: nobody else need ever know that you added

“brushed teeth” or “made coffee” to the list.) Yet this is no mere exercise in

consolation: there’s good evidence for the motivating power of “small

wins,” so the likely consequence of commemorating your minor

achievements in this fashion is that you’ll achieve more of them, and less-

minor ones besides.

5. Consolidate your caring.

Social media is a giant machine for getting you to spend your time caring

about the wrong things (this page), but for the same reason, it’s also a

machine for getting you to care about too many things, even if they’re each

indisputably worthwhile. We’re exposed, these days, to an unending stream

of atrocities and injustice—each of which might have a legitimate claim on

our time and our charitable donations, but which in aggregate are more than

any one human could ever effectively address. (Worse, the logic of the

attention economy obliges campaigners to present whatever crisis they’re

addressing as uniquely urgent. No modern fundraising organization would

dream of describing its cause as the fourth-or fifth-most important of the

day.)

Once you grasp the mechanisms operating here, it becomes easier to

consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics: to decide

that your spare time, for the next couple of years, will be spent lobbying for

prison reform and helping at a local food pantry—not because fires in the

Amazon or the fate of refugees don’t matter, but because you understand

that to make a difference, you must focus your finite capacity for care.

6. Embrace boring and single-purpose technology.

Digital distractions are so seductive because they seem to offer the chance

of escape to a realm where painful human limitations don’t apply: you need

never feel bored or constrained in your freedom of action, which isn’t the

case when it comes to work that matters (this page). You can combat this

problem by making your devices as boring as possible—first by removing

social media apps, even email if you dare, and then by switching the

screen from color to grayscale. (At the time of writing, on the iPhone, this

option can be found under Settings > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut

> Color Filters.) “After going to grayscale, I’m not a different person all of

a sudden, but I feel more in control of my phone, which now looks like a

tool rather than a toy,” the technology journalist Nellie Bowles writes in

The New York Times. Meanwhile, as far as possible, choose devices with

only one purpose, such as the Kindle ereader, on which it’s tedious and

awkward to do anything but read. If streaming music and social media lurk

only a click or swipe away, they’ll prove impossible to resist when the first

twinge of boredom or difficulty arises in the activity on which you’re

attempting to focus.

7. Seek out novelty in the mundane.

It turns out that there may be a way to lessen, or even reverse, the

dispiriting manner in which time seems to speed up as we age, so that the

fewer weeks we have left, the faster we seem to lose them (this page). The

likeliest explanation for this phenomenon is that our brains encode the

passage of years on the basis of how much information we process in any

given interval. Childhood involves plentiful novel experiences, so we

remember it as having lasted forever; but as we get older, life gets

routinized—we stick to the same few places of residence, the same few

relationships and jobs—and the novelty tapers off. “As each passing year

converts…experience into automatic routine,” wrote William James, soon

“the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to

contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.”

The standard advice for counteracting this is to cram your life with

novel experiences, and this does work. But it’s liable to worsen another

problem, “existential overwhelm” (this page). Moreover, it’s impractical: if

you have a job or children, much of life will necessarily be somewhat

routine, and opportunities for exotic travel may be limited. An alternative,

Shinzen Young explains, is to pay more attention to every moment,

however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things

but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have. Experience life

with twice the usual intensity, and “your experience of life would be twice

as full as it currently is”—and any period of life would be remembered as

having lasted twice as long. Meditation helps here. But so does going on

unplanned walks to see where they lead you, using a different route to get to

work, taking up photography or birdwatching or nature drawing or

journaling, playing “I Spy” with a child: anything that draws your attention

more fully into what you’re doing in the present.

8. Be a “researcher” in relationships.

The desire to feel securely in control of how our time unfolds causes

numerous problems in relationships, where it manifests not just in overtly

“controlling” behavior but in commitment-phobia, the inability to listen,

boredom, and the desire for so much personal sovereignty over your time

that you miss out on enriching experiences of communality (chapter 12).

One useful approach for loosening your grip comes from the preschool

education expert Tom Hobson, though, as he points out, its value is hardly

limited to interactions with small children: when presented with a

challenging or boring moment, try deliberately adopting an attitude of

curiosity, in which your goal isn’t to achieve any particular outcome, or

successfully explain your position, but, as Hobson puts it, “to figure out

who this human being is that we’re with.” Curiosity is a stance well suited

to the inherent unpredictability of life with others, because it can be

satisfied by their behaving in ways you like or dislike—whereas the stance

of demanding a certain result is frustrated each time things fail to go your

way.

Indeed, you could try taking this attitude toward everything, as the self-

help writer Susan Jeffers suggests in her book Embracing Uncertainty. Not

knowing what’s coming next—which is the situation you’re always in, with

regard to the future—presents an ideal opportunity for choosing curiosity

(wondering what might happen next) over worry (hoping that a certain

specific thing will happen next, and fearing it might not) whenever you can.

9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity.

I’m definitely still working on the habit proposed (and practiced) by the

meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein: whenever a generous impulse arises in

your mind—to give money, check in on a friend, send an email praising

someone’s work—act on the impulse right away, rather than putting it off

until later. When we fail to act on such urges, it’s rarely out of mean-

spiritedness, or because we have second thoughts about whether the

prospective recipient deserves it. More often, it’s because of some attitude

stemming from our efforts to feel in control of our time. We tell ourselves

we’ll turn to it when our urgent work is out of the way, or when we have

enough spare time to do it really well; or that we ought first to spend a bit

longer researching the best recipients for our charitable donations before

making any, et cetera. But the only donations that count are the ones you

actually get around to making. And while your colleague might appreciate a

nicely worded message of praise more than a hastily worded one, the latter

is vastly preferable to what’s truly most likely to happen if you put it off,

which is that you’ll never get around to sending that message. All this takes

some initial effort, but as Goldstein observes, the more selfish rewards are

immediate, because generous action reliably makes you feel much happier.

10. Practice doing nothing.

“I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single

fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber,” Blaise Pascal

wrote. When it comes to the challenge of using your four thousand weeks

well, the capacity to do nothing is indispensable, because if you can’t bear

the discomfort of not acting, you’re far more likely to make poor choices

with your time, simply to feel as if you’re acting—choices such as

stressfully trying to hurry activities that won’t be rushed (chapter 10) or

feeling you ought to spend every moment being productive in the service of

future goals, thereby postponing fulfillment to a time that never arrives

(chapter 8).

Technically, it’s impossible to do nothing at all: as long as you remain

alive, you’re always breathing, adopting some physical posture, and so

forth. So training yourself to “do nothing” really means training yourself to

resist the urge to manipulate your experience or the people and things in the

world around you—to let things be as they are. Young teaches “Do

Nothing” meditation, for which the instructions are to simply set a timer,

probably only for five or ten minutes at first; sit down in a chair; and then

stop trying to do anything. Every time you notice you’re doing something—

including thinking, or focusing on your breathing, or anything else—stop

doing it. (If you notice you’re criticizing yourself inwardly for doing things,

well, that’s a thought, too, so stop doing that.) Keep on stopping until the

timer goes off. “Nothing is harder to do than nothing,” remarks the author

and artist Jenny Odell. But to get better at it is to begin to regain your

autonomy—to stop being motivated by the attempt to evade how reality

feels here and now, to calm down, and to make better choices with your

brief allotment of life.

Notes

Introduction: In the Long Run, We’re All Dead

the Frenchwoman who was thought to be 122 when she died in 1997: Two

decades after Jeanne Calment died, a pair of Russian researchers made

the startling claim that “Jeanne” was actually Yvonne, Jeanne’s

daughter, who had assumed her mother’s identity upon her death years

before. For the definitive account of the controversy—now largely

settled in favor of the original version of events—see Lauren Collins,

“Living Proof,” New Yorker, February 17 and 24, 2020.

Biologists predict that lifespans within striking distance of Calment’s: For

example, Bryan Hughes and Siegfried Hekimi, “Many Possible

Maximum Lifestyle Trajectories,” Nature 546 (2017): E8–E9.

“This space that has been granted to us”: Seneca, “De Brevitate Vitae,” in

Moral Essays, vol. 2, trans. John W. Basore (Cambridge, MA: Loeb

Classical Library, 1932), 287.

“we will all be dead any minute”: Thomas Nagel, “The Absurd,” Journal

of Philosophy 68 (1971): 716–27.

Surveys reliably show that we feel more pressed for time: See Jonathan

Gershuny, “Busyness as the Badge of Honor for the New Superordinate

Working Class,” Social Research 72 (2005): 287–315.

in 2013, research by a team of Dutch academics: Anina Vercruyssen et al.,

“The Effect of Busyness on Survey Participation: Being Too Busy or

Feeling Too Busy to Cooperate?,” International Journal of Social

Research Methodology 17 (2014): 357–71.

It’s  because  our  time  and  attention  are  so  limited:  See  James  Williams,
Stand  Out  of  Our  Light:  Freedom  and  Resistance  in  the  Attention
Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
“in a  new kind of  everlasting present”: Fredrick Matzner, quoted in Matt
Simon, “Why Life During a Pandemic Feels So Surreal,” Wired, March
31,  2020,  available  at  www.wired.com/story/why-life-during-a-
pandemic-feels-so-surreal/.
the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall once pointed out: Edward T.
Hall,  The  Dance  of  Life:  The  Other  Dimension  of  Time  (New  York:
Anchor, 1983), 84.
“a  generation  of  finely  honed  tools”:  Malcolm Harris, Kids  These  Days:
The Making of Millennials (New York: Back Bay Books, 2018), 76.
it is “possible for a  person to  have an overwhelming number of  things to
do”:  David  Allen,  Getting  Things  Done:  The  Art  of  Stress-Free
Productivity (New York: Penguin, 2015), 3.
“what the martial artists call a ‘mind like water’ ”: Allen, Getting Things
Done, 11.
“For the first time since his creation”: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic
Possibilities  for  Our  Grandchildren”  (1930),  downloaded  from
www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf.
“Life,  I  knew,  was  supposed  to  be  more  joyful  than  this”:  Charles
Eisenstein,  The  More  Beautiful  World  Our  Hearts  Know  Is  Possible
(Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2013), 2.
“The  spirit  of  the  times  is  one  of  joyless  urgency”:  Marilynne Robinson,
The Givenness of Things: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2015), 4.
1. The Limit-Embracing Life
St.  Anthony’s  fire:  See  Ángel  Sánchez-Crespo,  “Killer  in  the  Rye:  St.
Anthony’s Fire,”  National Geographic, November  27,  2018,  available
at  www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2018/11–
12/ergotism-infections-medieval-europe/ [inactive].

“an  independent  world  of  mathematically  measurable  sequences”: Lewis
Mumford,  Technics  and  Civilization  (Chicago:  University  of  Chicago
Press, 2010), 15.
Medieval  people  might speak  of  a task  lasting  a “Miserere  whyle”: E. P.
Thompson,  “Time,  Work-Discipline,  and  Industrial  Capitalism,”  Past
and Present 38 (1967): 81.
Richard Rohr, a contemporary Franciscan priest and author: Richard Rohr,
“Living  in  Deep  Time,”  On  Being  podcast,  available  at
https://www.wnyc.org/story/richard-rohr–living-in-deep-time/
[inactive].
“into a realm  where  there  is  enough  of everything”: Gary Eberle, Sacred
Time and the Search for Meaning (Boston: Shambhala, 2002), 7.
“The clock does not stop, of course”: Eberle, Sacred Time and the Search
for Meaning, 8.
“From  a  low  hill in  this broad  savanna”: Carl  Jung, Memories,  Dreams,
Reflections (New York: Vintage, 1989), 255.
“I  have  by  sundry  people  [been]  horribly  cheated”:  Thompson,  “Time,
Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 81. I have modernized the
spelling here.
“One  thinks  with  a  watch  in  one’s  hand”:  Friedrich  Nietzsche,  The  Gay
Science (New York: Vintage, 1974), 259.
a book that arrived on my desk the other day: This is Brian Tracy, Master
Your  Time,  Master  Your  Life:  The  Breakthrough  System  to  Get  More
Results, Faster, in Every Area of Your Life (New York: TarcherPerigee,
2016).
“Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus”: Mumford,
Technics and Civilization, 14.
“we  don’t  have  to  consciously  participate”:  Bruce  Tift,  Already  Free:
Buddhism  Meets  Psychotherapy  on  the  Path  of  Liberation  (Boulder:
Sounds True, 2015), 152.
“We  labour  at  our  daily  work  more  ardently”:  Friedrich  Nietzsche,
Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
158.

“You  teach  best  what  you  most  need  to  learn”:  Richard  Bach,  Illusions:
The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (New York: Delta, 1998), 48.
what in  German  has been called Eigenzeit: Morten Svenstrup, Towards a
New  Time  Culture,  trans.  Peter  Holm-Jensen  (Copenhagen:  Author,
2013), 8.
as the journalist Anne Helen Petersen writes: Anne Helen Petersen, “How
Millennials  Became  the  Burnout  Generation,”  BuzzFeed,  January  5,
2019,  available  at
www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-
generation-debt-work.
“Depressing?  Not  a  bit  of  it”:  Charles  Garfield  Lott  Du  Cann,  Teach
Yourself  to  Live  (London:  Teach  Yourself,  2017),  loc.  107  of  2101,
Kindle.
2. The Efficiency Trap
Research  shows  that  this  feeling  arises  on  every  rung  of  the  economic
ladder: On the ways “time poverty” and economic poverty interact, see
for  example  Andrew  S.  Harvey  and  Arun  K.  Mukhopadhyay,  “When
Twenty-Four Hours Is Not Enough: Time Poverty of Working Parents,”
Social  Indicators  Research  82  (2007):  57–77.  But  feelings  of  (and
complaints  about)  busyness  are  actually  worse  among  those  earning
more:  See  Daniel  Hammermesh,  Spending  Time:  The  Most  Valuable
Resource (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
As the law professor Daniel Markovits has shown: Daniel Markovits, “How
Life  Became  an  Endless,  Terrible  Competition,”  The  Atlantic,
September  2019,  available  at
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/meritocracys-
miserable-winners/594760/.
the English journalist Arnold Bennett published a short and grouchy book:
All  quotations  from  How  to  Live  on  24  Hours  a  Day  are  from  the
unpaginated  Project  Gutenberg  transcription,  available  at
www.gutenberg.org/files/2274/2274-h/2274-h.htm.

in her book More Work for Mother: Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “The Invention
of Housework: The Early Stages of Industrialization,” in More Work for
Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to
the Microwave (London: Free Association, 1989), 40–68.
“Work  expands  so as  to  fill the  time  available”: C.  Northcote Parkinson,
“Parkinson’s  Law,”  The  Economist,  November  19,  1955,  available  at
www.economist.com/news/1955/11/19/parkinsons-law.
As  the  German  sociologist  Hartmut  Rosa  explains: Hartmut  Rosa, Social
Acceleration:  A  New  Theory  of  Modernity,  trans.  Jonathan  Trejo-
Mathys (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
“The  more  we  can  accelerate  our  ability  to  go  to  different  places”:
Jonathan  Trejo-Mathys,  “Translator’s  Introduction,”  in  Rosa,  Social
Acceleration, xxi.
“a  limitless  reservoir  for  other  people’s  expectations”:  Jim  Benson,
personal communication.
“don’t  even  realize  something  is  broken”:  Alexis Ohanian, Without  Their
Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed (New
York: Business Plus, 2013), 159.
“I  prefer  to  brew  my  coffee”:  Tim  Wu,  “The  Tyranny  of  Convenience,”
New York Times, February 18, 2018.
“Every  morning  I  carefully  scrape  out  the  ash  of  yesterday”:  Sylvia
Keesmaat, “Musings on an Inefficient Life,” Topology, March 16, 2017,
available  at  www.topologymagazine.org/essay/throwback/musings-on-
an-inefficient-life/.
“How else  are we  to get  to know  this place”: Keesmaat, “Musings on an
Inefficient Life.”
3. Facing Finitude
“Being-towards-death”:  Martin  Heidegger,  Being  and  Time,  trans.  John
Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 277 and
passim.
“de-severance”: Heidegger, Being and Time, 139.

“anxiety ‘in the face of’ that potentiality-for-Being”: Heidegger, Being and
Time, 295.
“a world is worlding all around us”: Martin Heidegger, quoted in Richard
Polt, Heidegger: An Introduction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1999), 1.
“the  brute  reality  on  which  all  of  us  ought  to  be  constantly  stubbing  our
toes”: Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and
Apricot Cocktails (New York: Other Press, 2016), 51.
“If I believed that my life would last forever”: Martin Hägglund, This Life:
Why Mortality Makes Us Free (London: Profile, 2019), 5.
“Heaven: Will It Be Boring?”: Quoted in Hägglund, This Life, 4.
“Something has happened. A piece of news”: Marion Coutts, The Iceberg:
A Memoir (New York: Black Cat, 2014), loc. 23 of 3796, Kindle.
“bright  sadness”:  Richard  Rohr,  Falling  Upward:  A  Spirituality  for  the
Two Halves of Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011), 117.
“stubborn gladness”: A paraphrasing of Jack Gilbert’s poem “A Brief for
the Defense,” published in Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 2014),
213.
“sober  joy”:  Bruce  Ballard,  review  of  “Heidegger’s  Moral  Ontology  by
James Reid,” Review of Metaphysics 73 (2020): 625–26.
“a sort of personal affront”: Paul Sagar, “On Going On and On and On,”
Aeon,  September  3,  2018,  available  at  aeon.co/essays/theres-a-big-
problem-with-immortality-it-goes-on-and-on.
“I was early…so I spent some time in a nearby park”: All quotations from
David Cain in this chapter come from “Your Whole Life Is Borrowed
Time,”  Raptitude,  August  13,  2018,  available  at
www.raptitude.com/2018/08/your-whole-life-is-borrowed-time.
4. Becoming a Better Procrastinator
As the American author and teacher Gregg Krech puts it: Gregg Krech, The
Art  of  Taking  Action:  Lessons  from  Japanese  Psychology  (Monkton,
VT: ToDo Institute, 2014), 19.

the  extraordinarily  irritating  parable  of  the  rocks  in  the  jar:  Stephen  R.
Covey, First Things First (New York: Free Press, 1996), 88.
the  graphic  novelist  and  creativity  coach  Jessica  Abel:  Quotations  from
Jessica  Abel  come  from  “How  to  Escape  Panic  Mode  and  Embrace
Your  Life-Expanding  Projects,”  available  at  jessicaabel.com/pay-
yourself-first-life-expanding-projects/.
In their book Personal Kanban: Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry,
Personal Kanban: Mapping Work, Navigating Life (Scotts Valley, CA:
CreateSpace, 2011), 39.
There  is  a  story  attributed  to  Warren  Buffett:  The  tale  of  the  purported
origins  of  this  story,  and  of  Buffett’s  comment  that  he  can’t  recall
anything of the sort, is related in Ruth Umoh, “The Surprising Lesson
This  25-Year-Old  Learned  from  Asking  Warren  Buffett  an
Embarrassing  Question,”  CNBC  Make  It,  June  5,  2018,  available  at
www.cnbc.com/2018/06/05/warren-buffetts-answer-to-this-question-
taught-alex-banayan-a-lesson.html.
“it’s  much  harder  than  that”:  Elizabeth  Gilbert  attributes  this  line  to  “a
wise  older  woman”  in  a  Facebook  post  dated  November  4,  2015,
available  at  www.facebook.com/GilbertLiz/posts/how-many-times-in-
your-life-have-you-needed-to-say-thisand-do-you-need-to-say-
it/915704835178299/.
The philosopher  Costica Bradatan illustrates  the point: Costica Bradatan,
“Why  Do  Anything?  A  Meditation  on  Procrastination,”  New  York
Times, September 18, 2016.
consider the case of the worst boyfriend ever, Franz Kafka: In addition to
the original letters, reproduced in Letters to Felice, ed. Erich Heller and
Jürgen  Born  (New  York:  Schocken,  1973),  my  account  of  Kafka’s
relationship  with  Felice  Bauer  draws  on  Eleanor  Bass,  “Kafka  Was  a
Terrible  Boyfriend,”  LitHub,  February  14,  2018,  available  at
lithub.com/kafka-was-a-terrible-boyfriend;  and  Rafia  Zakaria,  “Franz
Kafka’s Virtual Romance: A Love Affair by Letters as Unreal as Online
Dating,”  The  Guardian  books  blog,  August  12,  2016,  available  at

www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/aug/12/franz-kafkas-
virtual-world-romance-felice-bauer.
“neuroses  are  no  different  from  ours”:  Morris  Dickstein,  “A  Record  of
Kafka’s  Love  for  a  Girl  and  Hate  for  Himself,”  New  York  Times,
September 30, 1973.
“the future, which we dispose of to our liking”: Henri Bergson, Time and
Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.
L. Pogson (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001), 9.
“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities”: Bergson,
Time and Free Will, 10.
“You  must  settle,  in  a  relatively  enduring  way”:  Robert  E.  Goodin,  On
Settling (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 65.
Once, in an experiment, the Harvard University social psychologist Daniel
Gilbert: Daniel Gilbert and Jane Ebert, “Decisions and Revisions: The
Affective Forecasting of Changeable Outcomes,” Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology 82 (2002): 503–14.
5. The Watermelon Problem
watching  two  reporters  from  BuzzFeed  wrap  rubber  bands  around  a
watermelon: Chelsea Marshall, James Harness, and Edd Souaid, “This
Is  What  Happens  When  Two  BuzzFeed  Employees  Explode  a
Watermelon,”  BuzzFeed,  April  8,  2016,  available  at
www.buzzfeed.com/chelseamarshall/watermelon-explosion.
“I  want  to  stop  watching  so  bad”:  “In  Online  First,  ‘Exploding
Watermelon’  Takes  the  Cake,”  Phys.org,  April  8,  2016,  available  at
phys.org/news/2016–04-online-watermelon-cake.html [inactive].
“I’ve  been  watching  you  guys  put  rubber  bands  around  a  watermelon”:
Tasneem  Nashrulla,  “We  Blew  Up  a  Watermelon  and  Everyone  Lost
Their  Freaking  Minds,”  BuzzFeed,  April  8,  2016,  available  at
www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tasneemnashrulla/we-blew-up-a-
watermelon-and-everyone-lost-their-freaking-min.

according to one calculation, by the psychologist Timothy Wilson: Quoted
in Jane Porter, “You’re More Biased Than You Think,” Fast Company,
October  6,  2014,  available  at  www.fastcompany.com/3036627/youre-
more-biased-than-you-think.
“baking their  bodies  in the sun”: Seneca, “De Brevitate Vitae,” in Moral
Essays, vol. 2, trans. John W. Basore (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical
Library, 1932), 327.
the  case  of  the  Austrian  psychotherapist  Viktor  Frankl:  Viktor  Frankl,
Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon, 2006).
“Attention is the beginning of devotion”: Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected
Essays (New York: Penguin, 2016), loc. 166 of 1669, Kindle.
the former Facebook investor turned detractor Roger McNamee: Quoted in
“Full Q&A: Zucked Author Roger McNamee on Recode Decode,” Vox,
February  11,  2019,  available  at
www.vox.com/podcasts/2019/2/11/18220779/zucked-book-roger-
mcnamee-decode-kara-swisher-podcast-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-fb-
sheryl-sandberg.
In the words of the philosopher: Quoted in James Williams, Stand  Out of
Our Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), xii.
“distracted from distraction by distraction”: T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in
Four Quartets (Boston: Mariner, 1968), 5.
“a  thousand  people  on  the  other  side  of  the  screen”:  For  example,  in
Bianca  Bosker,  “The  Binge  Breaker,”  The  Atlantic,  November  2016,
available  at  www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-binge-
breaker/501122/.
6. The Intimate Interrupter
during the  winter  months of 1969: My account of Steve/Shinzen Young’s
story, and all quotations from Young, come from my interview with him
and  from  Shinzen  Young,  The  Science  of  Enlightenment:  How
Meditation Works (Boulder: Sounds True, 2016).

“the  intimate  interrupter”:  Mary  Oliver,  Upstream:  Selected  Essays,  loc.
305 of 1669, Kindle.
“self within the self”: Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays, loc. 302 of
1669, Kindle.
“One  of  the  puzzling  lessons  I  have  learned”:  Krech,  The  Art  of  Taking
Action, 71.
To quote the psychotherapist Bruce Tift once more: Tift, Already Free, 152.
“a  realm  in  which  space  doesn’t  matter  and  time  spreads  out”:  James
Duesterberg,  “Killing  Time,”  The  Point  Magazine,  March  29,  2020,
available at thepointmag.com/politics/killing-time/ [inactive].
Some  Zen  Buddhists  hold:  See,  for  example,  John  Tarrant,  “You  Don’t
Have  to  Know,”  Lion’s  Roar,  March  7,  2013,  available  at
www.lionsroar.com/you-dont-have-to-know-tales-of-trauma-and-
transformation-march-2013/.
7. We Never Really Have Time
“Hofstadter’s law”: Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal
Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 152.
“Dad  Suggests  Arriving  at  Airport  14  Hours  Early”:  The  Onion,
September  22,  2012,  available  at  www.theonion.com/dad-suggests-
arriving-at-airport-14-hours-early-1819573933.
“We  assume  we  have  three  hours  or  three  days to  do something”:  David
Cain,  “You  Never  Have  Time,  Only  Intentions,”  Raptitude,  May  23,
2017,  available  at  www.raptitude.com/2017/05/you-never-have-time-
only-intentions.
“So  imprudent  are  we”:  Blaise  Pascal,  Pensées,  trans.  W.  F.  Trotter
(Mineola, NY: Dover, 2018), 49.
“If  I  go  to  sleep  after  lunch  in  the  room  where  I  work”:  Simone  de
Beauvoir,  All  Said  and  Done,  trans.  Patrick  O’Brian  (New  York:
Putnam, 1974), 1.
“Trying  to  control  the  future  is  like  trying  to  take  the  master  carpenter’s
place”: Stephen Mitchell, Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New

York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006), 92.
“Do  not  rule  over  imaginary  kingdoms  of  endlessly  proliferating
possibilities”:  Quoted  in  Shaila  Catherine,  “Planning  and  the  Busy
Mind,”  talk  transcript  available  at  www.imsb.org/teachings/written-
teachings-articles-and-interviews/planning-and-the-busy-mind-2.
“Take no thought for the morrow”: Matthew 6:34, The Bible: King James
Version (London: Penguin Classics, 2006), 1555.
“Partway  through  this  particular  talk…Krishnamurti  suddenly  paused”:
Quoted in Bhava Ram, Deep Yoga: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times
(Coronado, CA: Deep Yoga, 2013), 76.
in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein: Quoted
in Catherine, “Planning and the Busy Mind.”
8. You Are Here
In  his  book  Back  to  Sanity,  the  psychologist  Steve  Taylor:  Steve  Taylor,
Back to Sanity (London: Hay House, 2012), 61.
what I  once heard  described as  the “ ‘when-I-finally’ mind”:  Tara  Brach,
personal communication.
“Take education. What a hoax”: Alan Watts, “From Time to Eternity,” in
Eastern  Wisdom,  Modern  Life:  Collected  Talks  1960–1969  (Novato,
CA: New World Library, 2006), 109–10.
there’s one West African ethnic group, the Hausa-Fulani: Robert A. LeVine
and  Sarah  LeVine,  Do  Parents  Matter?  Why  Japanese  Babies  Sleep
Soundly, Mexican Siblings Don’t Fight, and American Families Should
Just Relax (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016), x.
The writer Adam Gopnik calls the trap into which I had fallen the “causal
catastrophe”:  Adam  Gopnik,  “The  Parenting  Paradox,”  New  Yorker,
January 29, 2018.
“Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up”: Tom
Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia (New York: Grove Press, 2007), 223.
But  the  author  and  podcast  host  Sam  Harris  makes  the  disturbing
observation:  Sam  Harris,  “The  Last  Time,”  a  talk  in  the  Waking  Up

app, available at www.wakingup.com.
Mexico,  for  example,  has  often  outranked  the  United  States  in  global
indices:  See,  for  example,  the  Happy  Planet  Index,  at
happyplanetindex.org; and John Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey
Sachs, eds., World Happiness Report 2013 (New York: UN Sustainable
Development Solutions Network, 2013).
“Lawyers  imbued  with  the  ethos  of  the  billable  hour”:  M.  Cathleen
Kaveny, “Billable Hours and Ordinary Time: A Theological Critique of
the Instrumentalization of Time in Professional Life,” Loyola University
of Chicago Law Journal 33 (2001): 173–220.
“The ‘purposive’ man…is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive
immortality”: John  Maynard Keynes,  “Economic Possibilities  for Our
Grandchildren”  (1930),  downloaded  from
www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf.
“[We] see the Crater Lake with a feeling of, ‘Well, there it is,’ ”: Robert M.
Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: William
Morrow, 1974), 341.
that  quotation  from  the  bestselling  Buddhist  teacher  Thich  Nhat  Hanh:
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness, trans. Mobi Ho (Boston:
Beacon, 1999), 3.
the 2015 study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh:
George Loewenstein et al., “Does Increased Sexual Frequency Enhance
Happiness?,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2015):
206–18.
“We  cannot  get  anything  out  of  life”:  Jay  Jennifer  Matthews,  Radically
Condensed  Instructions  for  Being Just  as You  Are (Scotts Valley, CA:
CreateSpace, 2011), 27, emphasis added.
9. Rediscovering Rest
“Relax!  You’ll  Be  More  Productive”:  Tony  Schwartz,  “Relax!  You’ll  Be
More Productive,” New York Times, February 10, 2013.

“We  are  all  of  us  compelled…to  read  for  profit”:  Walter  Kerr,  quoted  in
Staffan  Linder,  The  Harried  Leisure  Class  (New  York:  Columbia
University Press, 1970), 4.
we actually have more leisure time than we did in previous decades: See,
for example, J. H. Ausuble and A. Gruebler, “Working Less and Living
Longer:  Long-Term  Trends  in  Working  Time  and  Time  Budgets,”
Technological Forecasting and Social Change 50 (1995): 113–31.
research  suggests  that  this  problem  grows  worse  the  wealthier  you  get:
Daniel Hamermesh’s research is discussed in Allana Akhtar, “Wealthy
Americans Don’t Have Enough Time in the Day to Spend Their Money,
and It’s Stressing Them Out,” Business Insider, June 26, 2019, available
at  markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/how-the-desire-for-status-
symbols-leads-to-stress-2019-6-1028309783.
Some  historians  claim  that  the  average  country-dweller:  Juliet  Shor,  The
Overworked American (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 47.
“The  laboring  man…will  take  his  rest  long  in  the  morning”:  Quoted  in
Shor, The Overworked American, 43.
To “look around to see what is going on”: Livia Gershon, “Clocking Out,”
Longreads, July 2018, available at longreads.com/2018/07/11/clocking-
out/.
The  Right  To  Be  Lazy:  Paul  Lafargue,  The  Right  To  Be  Lazy  (1883),
available at www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/.
“If  the  satisfaction  of  an  old  man  drinking  a  glass  of  wine  counts  for
nothing”:  Simone  de  Beauvoir,  The  Ethics  of  Ambiguity  (New  York:
Open Road, 2015), 146.
“I don’t get to bed until I’m so tired I could sleep on the floor”: All quotes
from  Danielle  Steel  come  from  Samantha  Leach,  “How  the  Hell  Has
Danielle Steel Managed to Write 179 Books?,” Glamour, May 9, 2019,
available at www.glamour.com/story/danielle-steel-books-interview.
Social  psychologists  call  this  inability  to  rest  “idleness  aversion”:  C.  K.
Hsee et al., “Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness,”
Psychological Science 21 (2010): 926–30.

his  famous  theory  of  the  “Protestant  work  ethic”:  Max  Weber,  The
Protestant  Ethic  and  the  Spirit  of  Capitalism  and  Other  Writings
(London: Penguin Classics, 2002).
guilty sinners anxious to expunge the stain of laziness: I owe this thought to
David  Zahl,  Seculosity:  How  Career,  Parenting,  Technology,  Food,
Politics,  and  Romance  Became  Our  New  Religion  and  What  to  Do
About It (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019), 106–107.
“We  are  the  sum  of  all  the  moments  of  our  lives”:  Thomas  Wolfe,  Look
Homeward, Angel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), xv.
“Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is
not  work”:  Judith  Shulevitz,  “Bring  Back  the  Sabbath,”  New  York
Times, March 2, 2003.
In  his  book  Sabbath  as  Resistance:  Walter  Brueggemann,  Sabbath  as
Resistance:  Saying  No  to  the  Culture  of  Now  (Louisville,  KY:
Westminster John Knox Press, 2014), xiv.
“Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness”: John Gray, Straw
Dogs:  Thoughts  on  Humans  and  Other  Animals  (New  York:  Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2002), 195.
“How can there be play”: Gray, Straw Dogs, 196.
“You can stop doing these things, and you eventually will”: Kieran Setiya,
Midlife:  A  Philosophical  Guide  (Princeton,  NJ:  Princeton  University
Press, 2017), 134.
“If,  on  the  other  hand,  [the  human  animal]  lacks  objects  of  willing”:
Quoted in Setiya, Midlife, 131.
My respect for the rock star Rod Stewart: Steve Flint and Craig Tiley, “In
My Heart, and in My Soul: Sir Rod Stewart on  His Lifelong Love of
Model Railways,” Railway Modeler, December 2019.
The  publisher  and  editor  Karen  Rinaldi:  Karen  Rinaldi,  “(It’s  Great  to)
Suck at Something,” New York Times, April 28, 2017.
10. The Impatience Spiral

The  practice  of  inching  toward  the car  in  front: S. Farzad  Ahmadi et  al.,
“Latent Heat of Traffic Moving from Rest,” New Journal of Physics 19
(2017),  available  at  iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367–
2630/aa95f0 [inactive].
It has been calculated that if Amazon’s front page loaded one second more
slowly:  See  Kit  Eaton,  “How  One  Second  Could  Cost  Amazon  $1.6
Billion  in  Sales,”  Fast  Company,  March  15,  2012,  available  at
www.fastcompany.com/1825005/how-one-second-could-cost-amazon-
16-billion-sales.
“I’ve  been  finding  it  harder  and  harder  to  concentrate  on  words”: Hugh
McGuire, “Why Can’t We Read Anymore?,” Medium, April 22, 2015,
available  at  medium.com/@hughmcguire/why-can-t-we-read-anymore-
503c38c131fe.
“It  is  not  simply  that  one  is  interrupted”:  Tim  Parks,  “Reading:  The
Struggle,” New York Review of Books, NYR Daily blog, June 10, 2014,
available at www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/06/10/reading-struggle/.
a  psychotherapist  in  California  named  Stephanie  Brown:  All  quotations
from Stephanie Brown come from my interview with Brown and from
Stephanie Brown,  Speed:  Facing  Our  Addiction  to  Fast  and  Faster—
and  Overcoming  Our  Fear  of  Slowing  Down  (New  York:  Berkley,
2014).
As the science writer James Gleick points out: James Gleick, Faster: The
Acceleration of Just About Everything (New York: Pantheon, 1999), 12.
“We  admitted,”  reads  the  first  of  the  Twelve  Steps:  The  twelve  steps  of
Alcoholics  Anonymous  are  available  at  www.alcohol.org/alcoholics-
anonymous.
11. Staying on the Bus
I  first  learned  this  lesson  from  Jennifer  Roberts:  All  quotations  from
Jennifer  Roberts  come  from  my  interview  with  Roberts  and  from
Jennifer  Roberts,  “The  Power  of  Patience,”  Harvard  Magazine,

November–December  2013,  available  at
https://harvardmagazine.com/2013/11/the-power-of-patience.
“tangible,  almost  edible”:  Robert  Grudin,  Time  and  the  Art  of  Living
(Cambridge: Harper and Row, 1982), 125.
“Boy, I sure  admire  you”: All quotations from M. Scott Peck come from
“Problem-Solving  and  Time,”  in  The  Road  Less  Traveled:  A  New
Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (London:
Arrow Books, 2006), 15–20.
“includes a big component of impatience about not being finished”: Robert
Boice, How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency: A Psychological
Adventure (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), 33.
The Finnish American photographer Arno Minkkinen dramatizes this deep
truth:  A  transcript  of  Minkkinen’s  2004  commencement  address,
“Finding  Your  Own  Vision,”  at  the  New  England  School  of
Photography,  where  he  outlines  this  theory,  is  available  at
jamesclear.com/great-speeches/finding-your-own-vision-by-arno-rafael-
minkkinen.
12. The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad
“I don’t have to take out the garbage”: All quotations from Mario Salcedo
come from Lance Oppenheim, “The Happiest Guy in the World,” New
York  Times,  May  1,  2018,  available  at
www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/opinion/cruise-caribbean-
retirement.html.
“A person with a flexible schedule and average resources”: Scott Adams,
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of
My Life (New York: Portfolio, 2013), 173.
“Last year, I visited 17 countries”: Mark Manson, “The Dark Side of the
Digital Nomad,” available at markmanson.net/digital-nomad.
In 2013, a researcher from Uppsala in Sweden named: Terry Hartig et al.,
“Vacation, Collective Restoration, and Mental Health in a Population,”
Society and Mental Health 3 (2013): 221–36.

research, which has demonstrated that people in long-term unemployment
get a happiness boost: Cristobal Young and Chaeyoon Lim, “Time as a
Network  Good:  Evidence  from  Unemployment  and  the  Standard
Workweek,” Sociological Science 1 (2014): 10–27.
The historian Clive Foss has described the nightmare that transpired: Clive
Foss,  “Stalin’s  Topsy-Turvy  Work  Week,”  History  Today,  September
2004. I have also drawn here on Judith Shulevitz, “Why You Never See
Your Friends Anymore,” The Atlantic, November 2019.
“Lenin’s widow, in good Marxist fashion”: E. G. Richards, Mapping Time:
The Calendar and Its History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),
278.
“What  are  we  to  do  at  home  if  the  wife  is  in  the  factory”:  Quoted  in
Shulevitz, “Why You Never See Your Friends Anymore.”
“Marching  aimlessly  about  on  the  drill  field”:  William  H.  McNeill,
Keeping  Together  in  Time:  Dance  and  Drill  in  Human  History
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 2.
And  some  evolutionary  biologists  speculate:  See  Jay  Schulkin  and  Greta
Raglan,  “The  Evolution  of  Music  and  Human  Social  Capability,”
Frontiers in Neuroscience 8 (2014): 292.
a study based on a frame-by-frame analysis of the race: Manuel Varlet and
Michael J. Richardson, “What Would Be Usain Bolt’s 100-Meter Sprint
World  Record  Without  Tyson  Gay?  Unintentional  Interpersonal
Synchronization Between the Two Sprinters,” Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 41 (2015): 36–41.
The  extraordinary  psychological  benefits  of  choral  singing:  Betty  Bailey
and  Jane  Davidson,  “Effects  of  Group  Singing  and  Performance  for
Marginalized  and  Middle-Class  Singers,”  Psychology  of  Music  33
(2005): 269–303.
The world “doesn’t open up into a million shimmering dimensions”: Stacy
Horn, “Ode to Joy,” Slate, July 25, 2013, available at slate.com/human-
interest/2013/07/singing-in-a-choir-research-shows-it-increases-
happiness.html.

“Totalitarian  movements  are  mass  organizations  of  atomized,  isolated
individuals”:  Hannah  Arendt,  The  Origins  of  Totalitarianism  (New
York: Harvest, 1973), 323.
13. Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
The Jungian psychotherapist James Hollis recalls: In James Hollis, Finding
Meaning in the  Second  Half  of  Life:  How to Finally, Really  Grow  Up
(New York: Gotham, 2005), 2.
“Then  I  considered  all  that  my  hands  had  done”:  Ecclesiastes  2:11,  The
Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005), 471.
“What  the  trauma  has  shown  us”:  All  quotations  from  Julio  Vincent
Gambuto  are  from  “Prepare  for  the  Ultimate  Gaslighting,”  Medium,
April  10,  2020,  available  at  forge.medium.com/prepare-for-the-
ultimate-gaslighting-6a8ce3f0a0e0.
The  late  British  philosopher  Bryan  Magee  liked  to  make  the  following
arresting  point:  Bryan  Magee,  Ultimate  Questions  (Princeton,  NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2016), 1–2.
“the  number  of  friends  I  squeeze  into  my  living  room”:  Magee, Ultimate
Questions, 2.
“the massive indifference of the universe”: Richard Holloway, Looking in
the Distance (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005), 13.
The Universe Doesn’t Give a Flying Fuck About You: Johnny Truant, The
Universe  Doesn’t  Give  a  Flying  Fuck  About  You.  Self-published,
Amazon Digital Services, 2014. Kindle.
“transcend the common and the mundane”: Iddo Landau, Finding Meaning
in an Imperfect World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 31.
“We do not disapprove of a chair because it cannot be used to boil water”:
Landau, Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World, 39.
“implausible,  for  almost  all  people,  to  demand  of  themselves”:  Landau,
Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World, 39.
14. The Human Disease

“Time  is  the  substance  I  am  made  of”:  Jorge  Luis  Borges,  “A  New
Refutation of Time,” in Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 2007),
234.
“There  is  a  strange  attitude  and  feeling  that  one  is not yet  in  real  life”:
Marie-Louise von Franz, The  Problem  of  the Puer  Aeternus  (Toronto:
Inner City), 8.
as the Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck puts it: Quoted in Joan Tollifson,
Death: The End of Self-Improvement (Salisbury, UK: New Sarum Press,
2019), 60.
“I  was  peeling  a  red  apple  from  the  garden”:  Christian  Bobin quoted in
Christophe  André,  Looking  at  Mindfulness:  Twenty-Five  Paintings  to
Change the Way You Live (New York: Blue Rider, 2011), 256.
“live  the  questions”:  Rainer  Maria  Rilke,  Letters  to  a  Young  Poet  (New
York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 27.
James Hollis recommends asking: James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living
a More Considered Life (New York: Gotham, 2009), 13.
There is a sort of cruelty: Landau, Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World,
40–41.
“at  a  certain  age…it  finally  dawns  on  us  that,  shockingly,  no  one  really
cares”:  Stephen  Cope,  The  Great  Work  of  Your  Life:  A  Guide  for  the
Journey to Your True Calling (New York: Bantam, 2015), 37.
The Buddhist  teacher Susan Piver  points out: Susan Piver, “Getting  Stuff
Done by Not Being Mean to Yourself,” August 20, 2010, available at
openheart  project.com/getting-stuff-done-by-not-being-mean-to-
yourself [inactive].
in his documentary A Life’s Work: David Licata, A Life’s Work (2019), at
alifesworkmovie.com.
“Dear  Frau  V….  Your  questions  are  unanswerable”:  Carl  Jung,  Letters,
vol. 1, 1906–1950 (Oxford: Routledge, 2015), 132.
Afterword: Beyond Hope

People sometimes ask Derrick Jensen: All quotations from Derrick Jensen
come  from  “Beyond  Hope,”  Orion,
https://orionmagazine.org/article/beyond-hope/.
“there’s  always  going  to  be  a  babysitter  available  when  we  need  one”:
Pema Chödrön, When  Things  Fall  Apart  (Boulder:  Shambhala, 2016),
38.
“People  say,  ‘Oh,  when  the  apocalypse  comes…’ ”:  Nellie  Bowles,
“Fleeing Babylon for a Wild Life,” New York Times, March 5, 2020.
“Abandoning hope is an affirmation”: Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart,
40.
“Spring is here, even in London N1”: George Orwell, “Some Thoughts on
the Common Toad,” first published in Tribune, April 12, 1946, available
at  www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-
and-other-works/some-thoughts-on-the-common-toad/.
Appendix: Ten Tools for Embracing Your Finitude
“You  could  fill  any  arbitrary  number  of  hours  with  what  feels  to  be
productive work”: Cal Newport, “Fixed-Schedule Productivity: How I
Accomplish  a  Large  Amount  of  Work  in  a  Small  Number  of  Work
Hours,”  available  at  www.calnewport.com/blog/2008/02/15/fixed-
schedule-productivity-how-i-accomplish-a-large-amount-of-work-in-a-
small-number-of-work-hours/, with further discussion in Cal Newport,
Deep Work (New York: Grand Central, 2016).
“When  you  can’t  do  it  all,  you  feel  ashamed  and  give  up”:  Jon  Acuff,
Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done (New York: Portfolio, 2017), 36.
evidence  for  the  motivating  power  of  “small  wins”:  See  Teresa  Amabile
and Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite
Joy,  Engagement,  and  Creativity  at  Work  (Brighton,  MA:  Harvard
Business Review Press, 2011).
“After going to grayscale, I’m not a different person”: Nellie Bowles, “Is
the  Answer  to  Phone  Addiction  a  Worse  Phone?,”  New  York  Times,
January 12, 2018.

“As each passing year converts…experience into automatic routine”:

William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Dover,

1950), 625.

“your experience of life would be twice as full as it currently is”: Young,

The Science of Enlightenment, 31.

“to figure out who this human being is that we’re with”: Tom Hobson in

conversation with Janet Lansbury, “Stop Worrying About Your

Preschooler’s Education,” available at

www.janetlansbury.com/2020/05/stop-worrying-about-your-

preschoolers-education.

Susan Jeffers suggests in her book Embracing Uncertainty: Susan Jeffers,

Embracing Uncertainty: Breakthrough Methods for Achieving Peace of

Mind When Facing the Unknown (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003).

“I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men”: Pascal, Pensées, 49.

“Nothing is harder to do than nothing”: Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing

(New York: Melville House, 2019), ix.

Acknowledgments

This book took its time. I feel tremendously grateful to everyone who

allowed it to do so, and who shaped it in many invaluable respects along the

way. And I hereby forgive all those friends who thought it would be funny

to point out that a book on the finitude of time was taking up so much of it.

(And it was funny, sort of, on the first couple of occasions…)

This project would have gotten precisely nowhere without Tina Bennett,

agent extraordinaire, whom I thank both for her expert guidance and

unwavering support, and for many insights that are embedded in this book.

I was also extremely fortunate to work with Tracy Fisher at WME, along

with her colleague in London, Matilda Forbes Watson. Among the

numerous people at FSG to whom I owe gratitude, I’ll mention here

especially my editor Eric Chinski, who (besides demonstrating enormous

patience) vastly improved the text and pushed me to get much clearer on

my ideas; and Julia Ringo, for handling the intricate later stages of editing

with such expertise. Much thanks also to Lottchen Shivers and her

colleagues in the publicity department, and to Judy Kiviat, Maureen Klier,

Christine Paik, and Chris Peterson. Stuart Williams at The Bodley Head

provided indispensable editorial comments. That so much of this time and

attention was bestowed while schools and offices were closed as a result of

the coronavirus pandemic makes me all the more appreciative.

I first explored many of the topics discussed here in other venues,

working with talented people including Melissa Denes, Paul Laity, Ruth

Lewy, Jonathan Shainin, and David Wolf at The Guardian; Zan Boag at

New Philosopher; and Peter McManus at the BBC. Conversations with Lila

Cecil, Jon Krop, Robin Parmiter, and Rachel Sherman were crucial to these

ideas taking shape as a book. The following people also generously

contributed their wisdom in the course of my research: Jessica Abel, Jim

Benson, Stephanie Brown, Carl Cederström, James Hollis, Derrick Jensen,

the late Robert Levine, Geoff Lye, Antina von Schnitzler, María Martinón

Torres, Jennifer Roberts, Michael Taft, Rebecca Wragg Sykes, and Shinzen

Young. Ashley Tuttle provided a wonderful place to work at a critical

moment and I was lucky, once again, to write much of the rest of this book

at Brooklyn Creative League, where Neil Carlson and Erin Carney have

established a warm and supportive community. I’m very thankful for the

friendship and conversation of Kenneth Folk and Maxson McDowell as

well.

One temporal threshold I crossed while writing this book: I’ve now

known Emma Brockes for more of my life than I haven’t. I’m very glad

about that, and for the fact that our children are now friends. Many

conversations with her, some of which involved her talking me off

metaphorical ledges, went into this book. Deep thanks also to my parents,

Steven Burkeman and Jane Gibbins; my friends from York; my sister,

Hannah, along with Alton, Layla, and Ethan; Jeremy, Julia, Mari, and

Merope Mills; June Chaplin; and the Crawford-Montandon family.

No handful of sentences will do justice to Heather Chaplin’s role in my

life, but let me say here anyway how ridiculously grateful I am for her love,

partnership, humor, and integrity, and for the many sacrifices she made for

this book. Our son, Rowan, arrived not long after work on it began. It

would be a mischaracterization (let’s put it that way) to suggest that this

development helped speed the book toward completion, but the

transformative experience of getting to know him is certainly reflected in

these pages. Unlimited love to you both.

My dear grandmother Erica Burkeman, whose childhood departure from

Nazi Germany I describe in chapter 7, died in 2019 at the age of ninety-six.

I don’t know whether she would have read this book, but she would

definitely have told everyone she met that I had written it.

A Note About the Author

Oliver Burkeman is the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who

Can’t Stand Positive Thinking and an award-winning feature writer for The

Guardian, where he wrote a long-running weekly column on psychology,

“This Column Will Change Your Life.” His work has appeared in The New

York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Psychologies, and New Philosopher.

He lives in New York City.